Comeuppance
by goldenmeadow
Summary: Love: foundered, fraught, feverish, fought for. Figuring it out. Poetic, poignant, permanent, not-quite-perfection. AH, very rated M, Edward and Bella, Emotional and Beautiful.
1. Long Snake Moan

**Long Snake Moan**

**A/N: Because the total raunchy (cougar that is moi) wanted to come out and play. And quite frankly, Jacob's been begging for it!**

**Seriously though, false bravado aside, this is my first attempt at AH/AU so I am a little nervous. Please let me know what you think, the good the bad and the ugly. It's a-okay, I've got my big girl panties on! **

**Long ass A/N at the bottom.**

**Most of the italicized lyrics are from **_**Flower**_** by Liz Phair.**

**Disclaimer: I do not own one single iota of Twilight or the fabulous characters that lend themselves so well to the twisted deeds I'm about to put them through.**

* * *

It wasn't as though our marriage, or sex life, was stale. I just needed…_more_. And something _different_. I wanted to delve my hand into a different jar, experiment with another flavor of scrumptious man candy.

Edward had been my one and only, he was my first and forever true love and my one, profound, sexual experience. So how was I able to reconcile _that_ with _this?_ How did I come to this point of utterly unexpected, inhuman depravity?

It was stupid. Juvenile. Impetuous. _He _was juvenile and impetuous, and I felt like a giddy teenager waiting, wanton, to be touched for the first time every single time I was in his presence. Hell, even the slightest glimpse of him had my heart racing until it wanted to burst from my chest as if infused with liquid toxin, and I could feel a swelling, a molten tingling flood of fluid racing out of me, wetting my panties. This compulsion of mine, the basest impulse on earth, to simply mate with this other man, stopped my breath time and time again.

_I want to fuck you like a dog; I'll take you home and make you like it. _

I just wanted to shove him against his truck, spread my legs wide, and push his head between my thighs. He took top billing in all of my masturbation fantasies, he was lead actor in all of my wet dreams, and I spent hours internally orchestrating epic Masterpiece Smut Theatre fucklore. He was, quite simply, _delicious_**.**

_Every time I see your face I get all wet between my legs, e__very time you pass me by I heave a sigh of pain.  
_

I was impervious to him at first though, I couldn't believe he was really looking at me _like that_! Edward always lavished me with praise; he worshipped my body, told me so many times about how many men were thinking about me, staring at me. I didn't believe it. I had never really _seen_ myself or appreciated my physical body. My sexiness was something I perceived through Edward's adoring, lustful, jade eyes, through his words and deeds and emotions. Not part of myself, but only the way I made him, specifically, react.

One afternoon, home alone and horny as hell, I discarded my clothes and scrutinized myself in the mirror in a fit of self-awareness (fucking Germaine Greer would be proud!). Turning around I inspected my ass, it was luscious, soft, heart-shaped and topped by two deep dimples. My back was long; I could see the dents my spine made as it climbed up to my shoulders, my hips swelling outward in a womanly curve I'd never noticed before. My waist was a high deep indent that swept effortlessly to my ribs. My shoulders soft and round, and lower, my thighs were creamy, pillowy, and crushable, like a sigh in the gentle air.

Turning around I hugged my arms around myself, lifting my slightly heavy breasts up so that my nibs, the color of pink roses tipped with a darker crimson, almost met. My skin, as I shushed my hands back down and along my arms, was smooth, pale, like rich cream. There was a small swell to my belly, Edward always nuzzled and nipped and nestled there. He adulated me in a bikini for the showcasing of that very part of me.

Stepping back, I took in my legs. Nude, they were longer than they usually appeared. And appetizing. Muscled but not obscene, certainly not like the horrifying female weight lifters whose tits had shrunk into pure planes of muscle, their legs like ionic columns! Mine twisted and turned, sensually wrought with sinew. Nothing hard, nothing jarring. This picture of me, as a whole, suddenly delighted me!

Unable to resist, I even lifted my legs up and spread them wide. I took in the whole first. Pink juicy lips enclosing all of my secrets (Camille Paglia, eat your heart out!). With the tip of my finger I lifted the little hood over my clit and watched as the tiny red heart shouldered forth. With one touch of my pinkie it swelled and a chill swept through me. I imagined Edward's cool lips sucking me, god he was so good at that! And then, betraying myself, I swore I felt Jake's full sized _suck-me_ mouth biting and tearing away at me!

I hadn't planned to get myself off, but this was getting a bit steamy. I moaned and bit my bottom lip before taking my other lips in my hand and spreading them oh-so-slowly apart. _Uhhhhn._ I looked. Like a shell, a whelk, a prehistoric nautilus, I was opened and glistening and folds upon folds of flesh. A ripe piece of fruit, a plump fig, with the pit deep inside. A burgeoning flower with all of its freshly born petals opening to the warmth of sunlight.

I ran my finger up my own wetness and slid it slowly inside. I remembered Edward doing the same. I imagined Jake's fingers in his place. _Oooooh!_ I snagged my neon pink Rabbit out of the drawer, warmed it up and replaced my fingers, Edward's fingers, Jake's fingers with this little piece of pussy engineering history.

Satisfied with my perusal of myself, sated by my other explorations, I felt stronger. Gone was the clumsiness, the gawkiness that had been my arch-enemy since puberty! My trademark blush (seriously, Bella-fucking-Swan-Cullen-Blush, Google it, it's copyrighted!), well, that remained…I found that I had no control over the tint of color across my skin.

All of this transformation, infinitesimal and interior as it was, did not go unnoticed. Not by Edward, who flattered me silly, fucked me until we were both nearly knocked out (even more so than usual and with a new demand) and lavished me with the scant amount of worldly goods that I allowed him to give: music, books, flowers and wine.

If Edward, who had known me for 20 years, had been my first lover, my _only_ lover, and seen me almost every intervening day since then, found new ecstasy in me…I must be onto something!

My sexuality found new heights, I was empowered. I soared!

And, well, that's when the idea formed….I started experimenting, just peripherally, of course, with other men, randomly, working my legs, my breasts, and my smile. I made sure my eyes sparkled and held the hint of a promise.

And it worked! I'd always felt confident with Edward, sexy and completely womanly, I knew his attraction to me was boundless, erotic, immeasurable, but this assuredness was different. It came from within me! It made me powerful, _in my body_. I put the full force of my newly minted charms to work…on our neighbor, Jake.

It was much harder with him than the arbitrary strangers I happened across in public. Only _he_ made me feel nervous. Anxious and tongue-tied. And shy--which I most definitely was not. I was just generally too wrapped up in my own inner thoughts to pay attention to the insipid bullshit that others felt the need to disperse at will, almost as if their minds were not fully linked to their tongues.

When Jake stopped and stared, and he always did, I glowed and trembled beneath his burning bold gaze. I could unleash my "I'm-getting-lots-of-good-sexin'" grin on all a-sundry, literally every single male in my path from the young to the old, the magnificent sexerpieces to the old gentry to the even older doddering men who were forced to carry their wives' handbags while they strolled, decrepitly, along the aisles of the supermarket on senior citizen day. Without fail I was met with penetrating stares, startled smiles, and even the occasional, "_Wow_!"

So what was it with Jake?

No doubt about it, he was a horny piece of work in his own right. Michelangelo's David be damned, Jake was Hercules on Earth; he was self-satisfied, swaggering, a walking, talking, cocking, sex god and he bloody well knew it! He put all the other toy boys on the block to shame. I wanted to give him a taste of my ambrosia. Open up the lotus between my legs for his bacchanalian delight.

If I had bothered to examine it further, I probably would have realized it was because with him, based on his disproportionately, unlikely, easily identifiable desire for me, that this _thing _with him could actually happen. In comparison, the rest was just play time, Romper Room for the cougar. With Jake I could just forget circle time, this was circle _jerk_ time for the new vixen that was me!

I swore like a drunken sailor, always had, force of habit from growing up as the daughter of a hard-working man who was the chief of police of a small, it's-5-O-Fucking-Clock-Somewhere, but equally hard lovin' and brawling one horse town. Edward, ever the upper-class gentleman, came from a different world**. **He frowned on my turns of phrases, my torrent of 'cussing'. If I said "cunt" in his vicinity I could literally feel the lash of wind as his head-whipped to look at me in disapproval.

In comparison with Jake, dirty rotten fuck-god Jake, I began to think of Edward as a wuss. He couldn't even, _would never ever dream of_, talking dirty to me. I started to hate Edward just a little bit because he would never be that shiny new thing I wanted; an ornament, a bauble, a souvenir to remind me that I did exist outside of the intertwined lives of 'Bella and Edward'. I longed to be singular again, a person in my own right with my own filthy secrets. And now I knew I was becoming evil; that I was going to embrace my sinful tendencies and let loose the full fury that was Bella, Queen of SexSheba!

Like Nike advised, I resolved to play hard, life was too short.

And Jake was not immune. He leered, and never was a leer more welcome. Not even King Fucking Lear or Hamlet or Macbeth held a candle! He ogled. Christ, daily he made googly eyes at my house, with me in it of course, that's how badly he wanted me! Depthless, black, narrowed eyes full of nasty, deadly promise.

_Every time you pass me by I heave a sigh of pain._

Who was I to deny this thing? Didn't I owe it to my mortality to experiment just a little bit? Could I really just leave my morality at the door?

Always out there tinkering with his truck or his motorcycle, that boy had more vehicles than he could drive. And I wanted him to drive me, straight through a wall. I wanted to fuck him six ways to Sunday and then shred the smirking calendar so I could have one more day of out-of-body-bending sex with him. I didn't doubt that he'd do me good, and hard, and long! I just wanted his _fresh young jimmy jamming slamming in me!_

Suddenly I realized that every time I was outside, gardening and puttering about, he appeared as if by magic, as if he had shape-shifted from the shimmering air itself to materialize in his front made sure to create make-believe tasks, yard work, tinkering with his autos, inspecting his porch, chatting on his cell, whenever I appeared outside. I could not be mistaken. He was putting himself in harm's way just as I was.

He smiled waved and seemed sweetly nervous yet intimidatingly bold when he addressed me those first few times. A puzzle, a paradox, _unknown_. He looked straight into me as if he could see the person I was trying to become.

During our brief conversations, I realized he was funny and wicked. Insolent and impervious as only a young pup could be. His trademark response of, "Sure, sure" next to Edward's impeccable diction only inflamed my addiction! Jake was exuberant and young and delightful.

_You act like you__'re fourteen years old, everything you say is so obnoxious, funny, rude and mean; I want to be your blowjob queen.  
_

He took his shirt off and I was lost in a sensual daydream at once. Bare chested, heaving, rough hewn, hirsute! His thighs were carved wood, his calves tensile, tempting, tasty treats that wanted to be devoured. Skin that looked soft to the touch and smooth but was scarcely withholding the strength of the double and triple-timing muscles that worked beneath his flesh. Flesh that was soft sienna, a rich reddish brown. His entire body was dense, packed, fully rippling and fucking massive! A brick shit house! He was easily 6' 5" plus a hefty few more inches for the shag sword I knew he had scabbarded in his pants.

And, good lord save me now, he was so dirty. Dirty mind, dirty body. A grease monkey who had no trouble wielding a monkey wrench and when would I get to do crazy monkey sex with him? He displayed a tribal tattoo, the head of a beautifully limned black wolf that dripped down his lowest abs, on show above his low-riders, before disappearing into the depths of those cut-offs. I wanted more than anything to see where that emblematic canine ended! And his left nipple was pierced, _oh hell yeah_! Should have known it would be no simple ring for this savage brute, it was some kind of pale sharp shard of bone thrust straight through the nub.

Wide brown face, strong square jaw, limitless obsidian eyes that gleamed with the thrill of all of my darkest fantasies. His cheekbones were high and tight, his nose straight and strong, his lips full and _mmmm yeah_ I could just imagine them on my own bits and bobs. Fuck me! I knew he was native, but this tribal shit was foreign, exotic, and barbaric. Primal and fierce!

_Every time I see your face I think of things unpure unchaste, I want to fuck you like a dog, I'll take you home and make you like it._

And oh my Mary Mother of God, the fuck-me dimples, and I was not even talking about ass dimples! Y-U-H-U-M! Not to mention the hair. Long hair on a man had never been such a turn-on for me. Until now. His was a straight jet black full mane that reached his shoulder blades and swept around his face.

_Your hair's too long and in your eyes, your lips a perfect suck-me size. _

Oooh, I wanted to bury my fingers into it, rip it back and wind it around my fist before shoving his majestic face into my full moons; I'd let him howl there if he wanted!

He taunted me with those shortest of short cutoffs as he mowed his lawn, _mow my lawn, puh-lease!_, what the fuck? Was he in a Christly Nair commercial or something? _We wear short shorts!_ was forever dancing across my degenerate mind.

We toyed with each other, from afar, distant and safe.

I knew he lifted weights. He tantalizingly strutted about in, well…practically nothing, all of his ruddy randy hotness on full fuck-me display like he was the Christmas showcase in Macy's main window _and_ left his garage door open wide while he was pumping iron. _Gah! Pump me, pump me please!_ Daringly, I asked him to show me the ropes, secretly wishing he would tie me up to his bed with some kind of rough hemp and senselessly attack my body. "Sure sure," was Jake's succinct reply coupled with a full-on wolfish grin, no smirking from him.

Two sessions in and I wasn't even trying any more. Both times he had progressed from mouth-watering push-ups and pull-ups to equally mind blowing bench presses and other assorted difficult gymnastics that I hardly registered. Lifting weights that probably made my own frame feel like the lightest feather, his iron-clad muscles clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing. Meanwhile, I myself was _clenching and releasing_, thank FUCK for kegels, until the sweat made a sheen on his giant's body, roving in sexy tracks down his chest, his straining gorgeous Grecian abs, trailing through the wisps of black hair that mirrored the mop on his head and hinted to the lush crop that would surely border his burnt umber man handle. My kitty kat was saying _Meeeeow!_

I had my own snail track thing going on.

His words were hitting the outside of my ear and then bouncing back against the wall. And he talked a lot! A husky grumble, muttering, with brilliant white teeth gritting through exertion.

Understanding hit me like a brick to the face, like falling out of the ugly tree and hitting shit-central; I made him just as nervous as he made me! That little love nugget emboldened me, made me the fucking personification of Eve, nakedly tempting Adam with the crude apple of knowledge, and covetousness. How could I possibly _think_ when he was all there, nearly fucking naked, hot as all goddamn Hades and Hell and Dante's Nine Circles of what-the-fuck ever all rolled into one?

The close air of his garage felt like a sauna as I tried to tear my eyes, all agog in awe, away from Jake and his _whatever_ pack! I'd lost count, getting dizzy and wrapped up in my perusal of the weft and warp of his abs, trying to restrain myself from pulling my fingertips all along the lushness of him. _Wait, why was I restraining myself from this body obviously created by God himself with a hefty dose of weight training? Get to it girl!_

I was done with pussy-footing around. I was practically wetting myself waiting for him to break out his penis peace pipe…I so wanted to take a toke on that!

I approached him on shaky legs, blaming the shivers on the lunges I'd just been trying and failing to execute. Quelling my nerves and dampening any thought of Edward, in absorbed fascination, I watched these hands that could not possibly be mine, not quivering, not shaking, only sneaking out to snake up his most insanely sculpted tummy. He _quivered_. He shook; he _trembled_ in spite of himself at my barest of intrepid caresses.

And his skin was blazingly hot! Now I realized why he ran about half-clothed! His flesh seared mine from the outside in.

Uninhibited, I let loose with everything I should never have thought let alone act upon! All my feelings were given free reign just as my hands were, and truth and lewd observations and absurd ideas assaulted me at will!

I allowed every traitorous act of my Benedict Arnold body.

Firm was not the right word. Sadistically rock hard, the indentations more like caverns of flesh that sucked in with every one of my touches. I alternately gripped and whispered down his body, ripped across his deep brown nipples, hooking and pulling and piercing my finger until it bled on the spiky splinter of bone that punctured him, outlined his tense sunset colored pecs with one lilting teasing finger before spreading my fingers wide to splay my hands across the unfathomable expanse of his abdomen. Outlining each and every muscle and trailing my fingertips into the whorled grotto of his tight, tight belly button. With the back of my index finger alone, I swirled down his beckoning happiness trail, ending with a vicious tug so that his beast of a body jerked.

A canine howl broke through his clenched square jaw and echoed around us. And still I did not stop. I'd almost reached the thick timber of his wood that was so shabbily housed in frayed denim sweet ass cut-offs before he trembled back into himself enough to grab my hands, fucking baby doll hands in his Wolfman Jack grip.

He pulled me straight against his straining body and the beads of his nips were almost as hard as mine, what a fucking turn on! Jake yanked on my ponytail with one hand, as though I was a wild Mustang, while plastering his other on the side of my neck, attempting to crash his mouth to mine.

Even more than halfway gone with the feel of his incinerating flesh wrapped all around mine, his chest crushing and flattening my breasts, making my nipples peak like Mount fucking Everest, I knew enough to halt his descent. A kiss was the only thing I would deny him; I could not let him near my lips with that mouth of his. I was certain the intimacy of it would bombard me and shake me from this disgusting desire that enthralled me.

His lips advanced and mine retreated. I whipped my face to the side and shook my head. "Don't fucking kiss me." I whispered.

Jake was pissed.

The evil bastard pulled me into the house, his lips curled harder than his biceps had around the weights that were left on the garage floor, abandoned. Once we reached the kitchen, he spun me around until my back was pressed against that ginormous chest of his and his goodies grazed and pulsed against my lower back. His ropey arms came around me and he tied me in place with only his rawhide hands on my wrists, tethering me to the countertop. I was slightly bent over, my ass now in full Houston We Have Contact mode with his taunting tomahawk.

His lush lips grilled my quivering neck and bit hard on my earlobe. In a clipped tone, with a thrust of diamond-hard dick against me, he clearly enunciated this time, "In that case, you cannot look at or touch _this." _And he pressed that wank magic pole into me again before finishing with his forked tongue tracing the outer shell of my ear then diving inside for an insidious lick, "_Unless_ you let me kiss you. But I'll let you _feel_ it."

He pulled himself out of his cut-offs just enough that I could feel the huge bare length and breadth of him pressed against the tight sweaty silky nylon of my black running shorts. He found the pleasure purchase in my cleft and just _stayed there_. His progenitors had obviously ordered Super-Sized at the great drive-thru window of conception, and it showed…right down to his jock! What the fuck kind of radioactive contaminated shit did they feed those kids at the reservation? Surely he was not human!

Gripping the ledge of the countertop, my twisted face was reflected in its sparkling granite surface, caught up in a harrowing landscape of intense delight and torture.

"C'mon Bella! Give a dog a bone!" Jake's resolve shook just as his schlong levitated against me, but his voice, so low and raspy and gravelly like an ancient dirt road weakened me even more. My nervous itching-to-be-fucked mind rejoined with '_More like a boner, dog!'_

_Fucking what?_ Dry humping in highschool had never been this hot or I'd have lost that big cherrytart V long before Edward! And screw the giant, without even touching or seeing Jake's snake, I could tell it was at least as big as that fairytale beanstalk stretching from fertile soil to the heavens, no mere pween for him. _I wanted to hear his long snake moan._

I had earned this. _I_ wanted control of this. But he was suddenly wiser and wilder and sexier and more domineering than I'd given him credit for. I felt I was losing this tug of war in an instant. I wanted to shout, "Heel mongrel!" But I had not even control over the air that was shakily drawing in and out of my lungs, let alone any verbal abilities.

My neck snapped back and into his lambent breath. My back arched, seeking connection. Jake held his mouth minute millimeters away from my skin and aside from his masterful meat Muppet he did not let me touch any other part of him.

My voice broke on a moan of sheer yearning and my sick quavering legs almost crashed me to the floor. Before I even realized that he had malevolently duped me into capitulation, I heard myself gasping, giving myself up, "_Please_, Jake!"

Whipping my duplicitous body around with a tough tug, only releasing my aching wrists enough to switch hands so that I faced him, still braced and buckled to the counter, he bent his thigh between my legs, sliding its muscled topography into and up and down the wetness that saturated me, slithering. All sense fled at that feeling. I brought my own knee up to prod the soft, hanging, huge sac of his balls, just barely nudging the lowest reaches of his potent appendage again completely hidden and protected from my desperate eyes. _Bow fucking wow!_

"That's a yes to a kiss then, is it?" His voice triumphant, his expression anything but gentlemanly. The man was so fucking sure of himself now; I knew there would be no stopping him.

I raised my head from the death dance that had been swaying me from side to side and lifted my eyelids, revealing the dilated depths of my craving. Hard and slate-like, Jake's own orbs razed up and down my suffering body before landing on mine. Grin back in place he didn't even bother to wait for my answer. He simply stooped down, cranked me back another notch, _yoga is my friend, yoga is my friend_, and with a swift incline latched onto my engorged lips.

Ferocious, wet, slathering, slavering and not one bit intimate! The heat of his skin was nothing like the intense fire inside of his mouth as I met and parried every single one of his thrusts. He was so fast and furious, licking and pulling and twining. Tasting and teasing and making me wetter than was humanly possible! He bit my lips, not a gentle teasing nibble, but a full-on bite that drew blood in the most erotic way possible! Then he sucked the tiny crimson droplets away. He mashed his mouth to mine, withholding his tongue teaser while my own searched and sought entrance. Finally I broke away, retreated. Not more than finger's breadth separating us, our mutual gasping breaths lashing across each other's faces.

_Uncle_. I won.

With a growl, Jake closed the distance and enveloped me once again in a searing snog. As I'd imagined earlier, I reached my hands up into his locks and fisted them until he bellowed, "FUCK Bella!"

I grinned.

That untamed grin set him off on an ambush because he let me go from my bondage to the granite surface only to caveman me! Gripping my thighs, swallowing them in his hands, my face resting against his shoulder blades where I continued to nip and nuzzle, Jake strode through the house to the staircase. He dropped me down. So slowly it was a movement palpably charged with tense sensuality. My soft, petite body sliding against his vigorous, enormous strength caused more moans and groans, such that the air around us was dripping with sex sounds and our bodies ground together, hands reaching and caressing, chests stroking and scraping, legs entwining and twisting and tangling. Heads lowered to each other taking kisses, finding new skin to lick, searching for fresh flesh to pant into.

My tattletale top was gone, shrieking _Liar, liar, pants on fire!_ My shorts dropped as if by magic, my plain white workout thong disappeared. Completely naked, with Jake, on his stairwell, I rode against him. His thighs, his waist, his hips, his yummy scrummy scrot.

Jake yowled as my body distorted around his. He lifted me up again, unga-bunga style but this time with his huge hands gripping my bum, fingers glancing into the crease and riding it down to the pulsing lips below. With my breasts squelched against his back, the bits of my nipples jostling into his clavicle with each stride and his fingers beginning to sweep up and down the _thick of my pussy_, I was crying out with every breath!

Finally we reached his room. His boy-man abode. Through the schmex-haze that threatened to blind me, I noted his posters of cars and bikes blue-tacked to the walls, his single-sized bed that looked more suited to a college dorm, covers thrown to the side and sheets that had seen a washing who-knew-when all rumpled with sleep and tossing and turning.

And through the window, I could see my own house.

I wasn't able to follow _that_ through to its logical conclusion because Jake the fucking Snake lowered me, bent me over his desk, and went to work on my dastardly derriere! His hands reached up and wrapped around me, easily engulfing both breasts, tweaking my tips and making me squeal like a goddamn cheerleader caught in a love embrace behind the bleachers!

God! He was too young, too fresh, too frisky, too dirty, too rotten, too…_everything_! I wasn't even positive he was of legal age, but fuck it. Just call me Mary Kay Letourneau!

His whole mouth enveloped one entire cheek before releasing and biting, I was sure he was going to leave the mark of his canines, but I didn't give a shit. The feel of his lips licking and paving wetness all up and down my ass was so worth prison time and permanent scars!

When my nipples had reached the ultimate dark red, rock hard, cut-through-glass state of arousal and my bottom was pink with his continued cruel caresses, _ass man much?_, I whimpered and whined and spread my legs a bit further, hoping to tempt his suck lips lower. My minge needed attending to, _pronto Tonto_!

_Sick boy already! _

Thank fuck he took the hint and traipsed like a mammoth Red Riding Hood right down to my tiny nub hooded in a caul of pink skin. And this was leagues better than the ass munching of seconds before! His shockingly acrobatic tongue dove in and out, up and down, slid and lapped before his impure lips enveloped the whole of me in a cunt-kiss the likes of which I had never experienced! I shuddered and cried and wailed and keened and bereaved for my clit that was certainly going to shrivel up and die if it didn't get just this type of attention several times a day!

Trying to regain some control, I sneered down to where his head was becoming a permanent fixture between my legs, tunneling away at my little birdie nest. I attempted to ignore, but pretty much failed, the sensation of his silky jet tendrils lashing my quaking thighs. He was hungry like the wolf! An insolent, indolent, minge maligner!

"Ease up baby; it's not a _chew toy_!" I squeaked at that last bit, remarkably sounding _just like_…a squeaky fucking doggie chew toy as one of his long, rough, callused, blue collar man's fingers coated with my potent potion pushed its way inexorably into my arse!

_Mmmmm_, what a vile Big Bad Wolf! _Knock it off with the cock commentary already Bella! Focus!_ On Jake, who was gorging himself on my fancy feast. I _purred_. And he was huffing and puffing, licking and sucking, plunging and swilling in all the right places!

Swirling, roiling as if through the daze of five gin and tonics with a dash of angostino bitters drunken stupor, I reached back, grabbed hold of his hair and shoved him away.

Dickhead was still fully clothed, well, as fully clothed as he ever was which meant microscopic shorts and nothing else, and we couldn't have that while I was well on my way to the boffing-fucking-kingdom on high!

Before heading straight to the Promised Land, I needed to have that winking, taunting nipple complete with primordial piecing in my mouth. Pushing Jake away with one ivory hand on his never-ending torso,_ I_ stalked _him. _Playing along, Jake slunk backward until he hit the wall. My blatantly aroused breasts, topped by lusty love buttons, hit him first, on _his_ chest. I slowly swamped him with my soft skin and willowy legs and arms.

A quick snicker up and down his strung-out neck, a bite and pull to his bobbing Adam's apple, and I was off to the races. A few more well-aimed, fluttering flicks brought me to my goal. By this time Jake's body had dissolved against the wall, he struck the back of his head against the plaster innumerous times and was physically incapable of filling his lungs with air. The agony of absolute ardor was like a wrecking ball across his magnificent visage!

His left nipple was calling to me. I opened my mouth whole, then oh-so-slowly pulled my lips inward until the sharp points of the bone hit my inner cheeks and my tongue tapped away with an unstoppable tom-tom beat against his nipple that sought to break away from the skin surrounding it. Moving along the smooth shaving, licking it at both ends and delving to the point where it entered his nib, I kissed him hard.

At the same time, with one hand I knuckled his lowest abs before searching lower. Jake's knees buckled.

Continuing to torture him with my bite and bile until every single solitary breath Jake took shuddered from his heart to his head to his dick, I finally unleashed him, thrilled that I had damaged his body.

Reaching his Nair shorts, my hands made quick work of the zip, and just shushing my fingertips along the panel of his cut-offs I shivered at the unimaginable gargantuan shape of his shaft.

Shedding those bitty vestments from his endless chieftain's legs, I shook yet again to find that he was commando, balls-out and barefaced!

I didn't drool, I had some control, but saliva did well up in my mouth to swill around my tongue before I forced it back with a hard swallow.

With Jake still caked against the wall, I backed up. I needed space and a better vantage point to take in _all of that_!

His cock stood straight out, proud and forceful, a deeper red brown than the rest of his body, from the silky straight thicket of pubes that were the exact texture as the hair on his splendid head, boldly declaring his virility. _It_ was a warrior in its own right. I wondered if he called it Little Chief, or more aptly, Big Chief! And I could finally see the rest of his tattoo…the wolf's head delved to a taut arched neck before tapering off into a strong native yet contemporary, curling, hooking plinth of ink that only served to highlight Jake's goddamned, unearthly, razor-sharp strut of V man-muscle that beckoned my eyes lower..._again_. I could not get enough of the sight of him. I had to visually prepare myself for what was to come.

Fucking _TIMBER!!!_ And shiver me timbers! I hoped I was limber enough to take all the fuck of _that_! I was pole-axed, good fucking GOD, I _wanted to be_ pole-axed, split in two, rent asunder!

Ughing Hell, I was so wet and my mouth was gaping open like a fool who was begging for the restraint of a straightjacket and padded cell, grinning and slightly maniacal!

_Everything you ever wanted_, e_verything you ever thought of_, _is everything I'll do to you_; _I'll fuck you till your dick is blue._

I pow-wowed before him. My lips and tongue lingered on the lines of the wolf and followed that curvilinear design right down to the famished depths of him. Languidly, I wanted this sensation to last, the feel of him filling all of the gaping holes hidden within me; I took him in my mouth.

Even after I played him hard with my suck magic so he came with the force of Old Faithful, his sexy spunk filling me up, a spunk filled chipmunk, _even_ half deflated he was still as big as a totem pole!

_Down boy!_

Yeah, he was not going down. Standing on shaky legs, Jake still splayed against the wall, I watched with rapture as his bounteous Billy club lengthened again before my very widened eyes.

Like a villain, having claimed his fill of air again after that impressive orgasm, Jake licked his lips, tasted me upon them, and started his own advance. On the warpath, fucking tomahawkin hand, he was aiming to claim this foreign soil.

Before I even made it three steps back, I hit the desk that was shoved against the far wall of his cell of a room. Jake caught up in one stride, grasped my hair in a death grip, threatening to scalp me. Primitive and uncivilized, his actions made me frenzied with lust!

With his leviathan hands, he pulled me to him and thrust, just once, just along the soaking slit of me, just fucking enough to tease me and cause feral sounds to erupt from my fiery throat. I bit his straining neck.

In retaliation, Jake lashed his tongue over my trembling lips and then plunged inside, his hands lifting me back onto his desk, knocking the piles of papers, collapsing pyramids of books and a jam jar of pens onto the floor. I scrambled back, spread my legs as wide as they would go, and ground my mouth like a she-cat into his.

And I won't lie, I squeed a little bit at the sight of him in all of his russet hued magnificence, in anticipation of _it_ in _me_. More than a mere squee, I gushed when he started to split me open, standing in front of me, towering over me like a mighty Redwood, thrusting me back upon on his tiny toy-like desk. I couldn't wrap my head around how he could possibly contort his body to fit this diminutive piece of furniture;how the fuck did he manage to get any work done on this thing? It was barely wide enough to contain my luscious ass; elbows braced beneath me, back bowed, legs spread, tits moving with every _long snake moan_ I uttered.

The conceited prick simply sneered at me. And when he started to coil his way into me, the smug fucker spoke harsh and low, "Just say _when_."

Fucking dirty ass bastard! As if I couldn't handle him! He'd thrown down the sausage-grinder gauntlet and I was surely going to take it up, and in, and sideways, and _oh god_ I hoped backwards! For the record, Edward's love pencil, more like an extra-thick sized chubster, was no laughing matter either. But I had to admit that Jake took gold in girth.

As _if_ I would give him quarter! Badass Bella loved nothing more than a challenge, or The Endeavor, or any other supersonic space shuttle man-rocket that could be shot into my throbbing core!

I bit back the howl that screamed up the back of my throat.

And still he advanced, shifting me, making up room that simply did not goddamn exist.

I choked on a sob of delight, a cry of complete corruption. I was literally choking…_god_! Had his monster dick sword reached my throat already?

I pushed down an aching breath, found my fleeing voice, edged as it was around the piercing, long, wide prick of him, staved to the walls of my body, and ground out, "Just fucking fuck me already!"

Jake obliged. And I about tore in two in enormous, decadent, degenerate, pleasure-pain!

"Mercy!", I managed to croak out when he was satchel deep into me and cleaving straight up through my body.

His previous arrogance turned to hardened lips, narrowed eyes and flaring nostrils when he completely inhabited me. No longer full of himself. _I_ was full of him!

There was _no_ worship here, no consecration of hallowed ground. Just pure desecrations, demoralization! He was going to fuck me, endlessly. And I welcomed it.

His long board of lurve lashed against me, into me, plumbing through the swells and breakers of my…_what-the-fuck-ever!_ He barreled into me! Plundered me relentlessly, _collecting all of my booty_;no plucking, pulsing, sensual _mess_terpiece here. Jake stole all of my worldly goods from beneath my nose that was raised high in the air as moan after groan after gasp after cry fled from my lips with the force of his thrusts that rearranged my insides. He plowed me and burrowed in me and scraped and rasped against all of the intimate furrows of my insides until I was on the verge of weeping; wanton, wicked and wild.

No doubt about it, he was a goddamn cockstar! Did he play Guitar Hero with his wanger or what? The things he could do with that succulent drool-worthy monstrosity were un-fucking-believable and should have been impossible.

It took only minutes for me to reach my second mind-blowing, body breaking orgasm. My entire being arched backwards and my arms were flung out as if in crucifixion posture! Prostrate in ecstasy.

I was still trying to breathe, and Jake was still trying to please…his movements never ceased, never wavered, and never waned. Not one fucking bit!

Instead, he managed to seat himself, with me still attached to him, screwed hard against him, on the straight backed wooden chair that looked so ridiculously tiny under his insanely immense naked body I suspected him of stealing it from the local highschool. _Oh fucking GOD!_ I didn't have a chance to climb down from the ceiling of my last climax before new ripples started rolling out all along my body when I felt what he was doing now.

With me on his lap, his forearms beneath my thighs, hands reaching up behind me to seize my weaving waist, I was spread wide while Jake effortlessly did curls with my body! Lifting me up and down, slowly, arduously. Twisting, heaving, huffing, our faces crashed, lips tugged, teeth nicked.

Oh so hellatiously slowly, he worked me up and down that weapon of mass destruction with me in its detonation zone, until I could hear myself beginning to whimper.

His slow pace was beginning to piss me off! And like any self-possessed, successful woman, I started to whine and beg and plead…in between gasps and panting at the fucking huge width of him slowly spoiling me.

And the asshole just grinned, baring his sharpened teeth, clenching his jaw as if in denial of his own desires.

He was the Crazy Horse of Cock! A naked Kevin Costner in _Dances with Wolves_ was entombed in a white man's shame next to this superb exhibition!

Sweat slicked between us, but still Jake persevered, releasing my mouth to meld his own to my pendulous swinging breasts that beat in an unstoppable rhythm to our slapping skin. Tits-a-fuckin-hoy! _Great, now we were doing Pirates of the Caribbean!_ I needed to rein that shit in already! I was already walking-_riding-_ the plank!

_Finally, finally_, when I was about to snap in two with the wildness of this fuckfest, Jake slid his arms from under me to hold my hips and simply plow straightforwardly into me. All pretenses were gone. Just tremendous fucking. His face echoed the torture in mine. Frantic, harried, half mad and all the way gone.

As soon as the shuddering turned to seizures and breakers of blinding bliss, tearing my limbs apart and throwing me backward against Jake's encircling arms, the wetness that spilled out from inside my body was so intense that even tears leaked from my eyes and rushed down my face before landing in the wide open gasping silent scream of my mouth!

And Jake, holy hell, Jake! His eruption this time was not even a geyser, more like a volcano! Vesuvius had nothing on the force of his orgasm and I could literally feel the melted hot lava of him surging into the condom that hardly contained that entire floe!

He was a legend.

Thoroughly blasted from the inside out, like he'd taken a jackhammer to my innards, I collapsed into him.

And when my mind was finally capable of thought again, I froze.

That jackhammer had not only wreaked erotic delight, it had inextricably brought disaster. And merciless misery.

Instantly, with stinging awareness, I felt like the lowest of low, a tiny pebble of frozen dog turd left on the neighbor's lawn. Worthless, puke-worthy, contaminated, cruddy. Cuntish.

The tears that had laced my cheeks in Dionysian delight were replaced by torrents of shame and pain and appalling transgression.

Staggering off of Jake's lounging form, I stumbled about gathering my discarded clothes. The sobs were breaking my chest, breaking my heart just as surely as I knew I was going to smash Edward's to smithereens. With this one futile act I already had.

Jake lifted from his lust-languor and tried to wrap his now boneless arms around my harrowed form. I could not stand that. I could not fuck one more person up over my own iniquity.

I only paused long enough to pull on my top and shorts, shoes and socks that littered the stairs and hallway. Jake had followed me, arms opened in supplication. I could not even look at him. All I could whisper, forlornly, stricken, was, "I'm so sorry."

Like a turtle, a slug, a snail, I wrenched my way through his domicile and out the door. Like a sick snake, unable to shed the skin of my immorality, I slunk across the road to mine and Edward's house, the house that had always been _our_ haven but that was about to become our hell of my own creation.

He would see through this sham, my sniveling nose and tear-tracked face would give me away at once. Not to mention my hollow eyes and the bereft pressure that was tearing me up. Even though I had imagined this to be my big, grand, blockbuster secret, I now realized that could never happen.

Edward. Edward was my touchstone. If I could not be truthful with him then I was nothing more than an imposter. A poser.

The hara-kiri, the atrocity that Jake and I had just committed had been devoid of any deep feeling...and it left me hollow rather than filled.

Time to face the music. The malediction of my miscalculations.

Edward was home early. I was never late. The paradox of us was about to rip us apart.

* * *

**A/N: Please review, because there's nowt better than a full **_**inbox**_** (yeah, you know what I mean!).**

**And, I know, I'm sorry! I'm not even a BJ fan (well yuh, I am a **_**bj**_** fan, just not necessarily a B x J fan)…but it all came to me in my sleep. Now that was a good night!**

**Thought I'd better add that yes, Jake is an adult here, just quite a bit younger than Bella (she's not doing the dirty with a teenager).**

**Now, this was totally meant to be pure lusty GAHHHing willy-tastic teasing fun but as you may have noticed, plot somehow appeared (okay, just a wee bit!). Damn that plot monster! So, it is only fair that Edward gets his…**_**game face on.**_** What will he do? And **_**who**_** will he do, if anybody? Y'all will have to review the shit out of this before I let you in on my l'il secret. **

**For more details on this story, including musical tidbits and Jake's tattoo, visit my profile. And don't forget to check out my other stuff (canon and completely unlike this), especially Woman King that is entered in the 'For My Valentine' contest hosted by manyafandom and ****isabel0329.**

**Finally, it will take me a while to update, apologies in advance. I am busy writing me own stuff, non-Twilight related, and took a huge break to start this. Bear with me folks, you won't be disappointed, Scout's Honor!**


	2. There's No Justice in the World

**There's No Justice in the World (**_**and there never was**_**)**

**Well, hell's **_**bells**_**, it's gotten awfully freakin' quiet in here…think I could hear a pin drop in this astounding silence! Never mind, I love me a good challenge, so I will persevere (and maybe Edward and Bella will too?)**

**Y'all will hate this even more…ah well. It had to be done. It's going to get pretty heavy here. But there are some funny bits too; just check out the Energizer Bunny bit!**

**The title comes from Soldier's Poem by Muse, which is a desperate song; check out the YouTube link on my profile.**

_**And, uh yeah, gigantic heart-on to vanessarae; she's the maxaluna to my meat cleaver!**_

* * *

I was home early. This was uncharacteristic. I just felt a surge of need, intense and nerve-wracking need, to see Bella. There was something I wanted to tell her. An important decision. A question. A hope for our future!

Waiting for her, I sat at my second pride and joy, my Baby Grand. Elegant, mellifluous, and sumptuous, this instrument reminded me of all the good things about Bella. About our most intimate moments, some of which had certainly taken place on the broad back of my piano, and on the bench, _and_ thrashing tunelessly across the keys.

I smiled pleasurably at those remembrances.

Flexing my overworked surgeon's fingers, I lit them upon the self-same ivories that had known Bella's beautiful ass almost as much as I did.

Bella was my weakness. And also my fortress.

Of all the people, the _sheeple_, the mindless plebs that I encountered on a daily basis, her mind alone stood out in its calm. I was only able to discern her thoughts through years of practice, observation, and attuned affection. Yet she still managed to mystify and intrigue me in the most beguiling manner.

Rising from my seat, I went once again to the backyard, expecting to find Bella hidden in the plush plants that she tended to and cajoled into life. Her affinity with nature at odds with all of the other jigsaw pieces of her. She was my puzzle, the paradox that grounded me. With her swearing, her drinking, her sexy loving…the beguiling shyness and clumsiness that departed as soon as she flashed her beautifully deep brown bedroom eyes at me! Her intelligence, her concern, her joy at the simplest things; her hate of the most extravagant.

Bella was not out back, nor was she out front. But her car was in the drive and cool to the touch. The door had been unlocked when I came home. She could not have gone far.

Returning to my piano, I settled for the moment.

Waiting.

Wanting.

And reminiscing. Glorying, really, in the exciting newness of Bella.

Recently there had been a change in her. This dainty, deliciously curvaceous woman I had known since I was a teenager. Absorbing my overly analytical mind, her transformation fascinated me and no less captivated my cock that twitched with every thought of her.

Always the exception to any rule, Bella was _the_ exception to _all _my rules. At sixteen years old I'd let her in. Me, Edward "Cold Case" Cullen. Truth be told, I hadn't so much let her in as she had _forced_ presence upon me. With her doe-eyed, defiant gorgeousness, her casualness, with the way she didn't take any of my adolescent, armored-up shit.

Breaking through my defenses with no more than a trip on her own feet, she tumbled into me while I stood at my locker, shielding myself from the mindless teen shit-chat that reverberated inside my mind. Without thinking, I caught her. And I heard…pure silence. Then I looked at Bella. And she hooked straight into my 16-year-old heart.

I could always see and hear fucking _everything._ Not with Bella. The hush was deafening, roaring in its wake! It released me from my constraints and allowed me to act, to feel, to understand, to want, to desire.

To act.

We acted almost immediately, injudiciously, unable to still our bodies, polar opposites that were instantly magnetized to each other, revolving like the solar system around the sun.

And I had always rejoiced and reveled in the fact that I was Bella's one and only lover, that she had learned everything _with me_. Masculine pride was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, and even I was not immune to it!

I never thought twice with her. I didn't have to; there was no forethought or catching up with another's thoughts and trying to play them off as coincidence. Pure instinct found me for the first time. I was spellbound.

Bella thrilled me and surprised me at each turn even from the get-go! For her seventeenth birthday, I offered any worldly good she could ever want, care of my hefty trust fund. To my surprise, she wanted a tattoo, and she wanted me to accompany her while she had an indelible design etched upon her flawless skin. Excited by her impulsiveness--for the first time in my existence with another human being, never knowing what she would do next--I understood in an instant that I would give her _everything_. And my heart swelled with a love that would prove to be unending.

I did my research, sought out the cleanest parlor with the best reputation and escorted Bella on her birthday. Holding her hand throughout, I was the only one quaking as she seemed impervious to the pain, another Bella brainteaser. Watching the fragile, sharp needle piercing the tight skin just within the succulent jut of her right hipbone, I saw a beautiful, miniature Luna Moth unfold its wings to beat against her flesh.

A moth, the most beautiful of the Saturniids. No butterfly for Bella. Why? She compared the fresh, pale, granny smith color to my eyes as they lightened from dark, verdant emerald when I came down from the earth-shattering orgasms she inflicted upon my pubescent body. Otherworldly with their nebulous symbolism, these moths were of the moon, the constellations, heavenly, just like our love. Illogically burning out far too quickly…a naive idea of Bella's…that my infatuation with her would be short-lived.

As soon it was healed and the bandages were off, I was always licking and sucking and plucking on the moth's wings; that was my spot. An emblem of our love; living upon her flesh.

We were destined to be each other's fucking everything, cheesy as it sounded even then.

Occupying my soul, she was the only person that got me. That lit me up and let me be _me_, all the while making more of this mortal coil that wound around us.

I looked up at the clock. Impatience was starting to set in. I tickled the keys halfheartedly, pulsing out the sounds of Bella's Lullaby. Half an hour had elapsed and it felt like an eternity would cast me into stone before I saw Bella's face again and could find out the answer to my query.

Bella was changing. I welcomed it. I worried about it. I felt shut out for the first time, even while I had always been closed out of her shielded mind. Lightening fast, the change was out-of-the-blue. And it made me understand that a more significant revolution was on the horizon…I hoped beyond infinity the thing that was transforming Bella was the mirror image of the amendment I wanted to make to our two-fold world!

_Big_ things. The first was a delivery in a nondescript, padded envelope.

A vibrator. More than a vibrator…the Waterproof Jackrabbit! I was man enough to admit I was the slightest bit intimidated at first by that bright pink tool that she worked thoughtfully, and then heatedly, in and out of her. _I_ was certainly longer and broader. But I didn't have the reverse maximum thrust of five rows of galvanized beads on my shaft (yeah, I'd inspected the bugger at my leisure and detailed every man-made bit of it), I didn't possess those long, jellied, _Leo the Lop_ ears that vibrated at increasing speeds against her swollen clit.

It thrilled me even while it unsettled me.

Playing it off nonchalantly, Bella laughingly and girlishly likened herself to _Alice in Wonderland_, taking her trip down the rabbit hole, except Jack was _in her hole_. And he gave a whole new meaning to the Energizer Bunny!

Still, I had my fingers, strong, piano player's fingers that strummed and sported upon the tensile keys of her body. At least she took JR for a ride only twice a week; every other minute she was mine. So I thought...

Her two-times-a-week treat, she said. After running, she enjoyed nothing more than a hot shower accompanied by JR, and bashfully admitted that it completed her release; her much-needed exercise.

Jealous of a fucking silicone dildo. Hell yes, I was! Sometimes I coveted the loving looks she bestowed upon it. The way she tenderly cleansed and swaddled it in a clean dishtowel once it had dried, as if it was a baby. I half expected her to break out the Johnson's Baby Powder for quick dusting! In awe, I watched as Bella's dormant maternal instincts emerged over a sex toy.

But I indulged her.

Something huge was changing.

There was an atmospheric shift in our cosmos. I welcomed it. I wondered over it. She'd always glowed before. Now she glimmered! Never more sexy or confident, she entranced me. Unable to keep my hands from her, I touched her constantly and fucked her incessantly. I was downright feverish in her presence!

Thinking of her all the time, I started seeing Bella everywhere, but this Bella had a belly. Bella pregnant, with my child; maternal, nesting, full of a mother's love. I wanted our baby to inhabit her womb just as surely as I inhabited her soul. The time was now. I wanted a baby to live within her, to be fed from her, to nestle upon her. Innocence. Completion.

I had everything a man could want. I lacked nothing. But I was ready for more. _A family._

I cracked those stiffened digits, stretched my arms out in front of me and linked my fingers to discharge the tension of every muscle.

_Where was she?_

I'd come home early specifically to broach the subject of starting our own little nucleus. Finally. Bella's upbringing had been hard, unconventional, and she had admitted from the beginning of my true courtship that she was not sure she could ever be a mother, if she could ever bring a child into this cruel world, the one she'd been raised in. Accepting her words, I had promised that I would let her decide this matter. Another similarity to the cosmic wonder of nature that was emblazoned on her skin; the Luna moth was born without a mouth and had only a short time to mate before starving to death. They reproduced only once. Having a child had to be significant, important, life-changing.

She was all that mattered to me. All that was of consequence, anyway.

But this alteration in Bella caused an unbearable ache within me. To be a father. More specifically, to father _her_ children and make us a more complete unit linked by our own blood and the combination our genetic material.

Finally, _finally_, the front door swung open with a crash on its hinges. That alone should have troubled me. Bella took care and caution over most every move, hyper-vigilant of her own inabilities.

Recognizing the post-orgasmic glow that suffused her creamy skinned visage, before I could even wonder what had transpired to cause that, I was petrified, made still as a marble statue by the expression that warped her fine features. The face that I dreamt about nightly, that I woke to each morning with a blessed feeling, that I longed for all day long, was ruinously misshapen beneath the harrowing, gaping aperture of her mouth and the silent tears that tracked down her tightened cheeks.

Disgraced.

She could not look at me. Refused to meet my eyes. She closed her own when I grabbed her chin and tugged her mercilessly to me. Hitting me with the impact of a fucking glacier, I realized at once!

Meekly shaking her head.

Causing an anesthetized numbness to spread through my limbs.

My heart plummeted to my stomach, to the lowest depths of Hades.

On fire and ice cold all at once.

Shaking.

Great draughts of breath shook throughout me while Bella keened in the corner, hugging her torn knees against her. Sweat slicked her; her hair was lank and played out. Her face crashed against her damaged limbs. And new bluish bruises taking the shape of wide fingers, handprints and suck-scars, were just beginning to litter her almost-bared sensitive skin.

I wanted to fucking kill her. Right then and there, I was ripe for the feel of her jugular tearing against my teeth.

Crashed.

Dashed.

Destroyed.

Discombobulated.

I felt dismembered, beheaded, even while I gnashed my teeth at her and my fingers, my loving-Bella fingers, hooked into talons that wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from her abused body!

Only used for healing, my hands vibrated with the need for butchery.

In this perfectly Polaroid-captured instant, Bella, my wife, my confidant, my lover, my soul-mate, my fucking _forever_ stole and stomped on and took a fucking meat cleaver to my heart, my spirit, my entire life.

It was Jake. She rasped out his name, making it known somehow that it was her own bidding. _Her own doing_.

Jake--not_ Jack_--not The Rabbit.

The hole swallowed me. Engulfed me. Took me much further down than I'd ever been before, much deeper than I had ever even contemplated. These depths were abysmal, an abyss! I smashed headlong into rock bottom before I even knew I was falling.

Jake, not Jack.

And all thoughts of our babies, our children, watching them grow, playing with them, nurturing them as we aged together, peacefully, happily, wrapped in our cocoon of love…all that was gone. Pulverized in an instant.

Of their own accord, my clawed hands raked through the bronzed hair that limped onto my forehead and into my eyes. Pinching my nose--gasping for breath as if my lungs were incapable of drawing air, as if my heart was un-beating--my hands shot forward as I lunged towards Bella.

Bella.

_Bella!_

It ruined me to even think her name. Ruptured from the stars and hurled into a hauntingly everlasting black hole.

Stopping halfway to her, I snapped my fingers back to my ripped-apart insides, so close to some gruesome instinct begging to take hold of me, to coerce me into a beastly vicious act that would only end in death. Wanting to lead her like a lamb to the slaughter, to make a true, blood-bathed abattoir of our once happy home.

Vile.

Bella.

Jake.

I wanted her blood. It called to me. I wanted to watch it spill from her just as my own veins were letting loose with every heart-pounding pulse. Slowly dying.

Swan song.

My nostrils flared on the sickening perfumed air that cascaded from her pussy. That smell, the _smell_! The scent. Clawed up through the air and raped my nose. The scent. Jake. And Bella. I smelt the sex of him within her.

I wanted to taste the iron tang of blood.

To think. To think briefly, unbidden. To realize that I had been on the verge of asking her to bear my child! I felt disemboweled, unseated! Uprooted! We could never have a baby, not with this, not with Jake, Jake not Jack, Jake that had been inside of…_oh fucking GOD!_...inside of MY Bella!

The thought of _him_ inside of _her_ made me boil.

That my Bella, _my love_, had fucked that whelp across the road who was still wet behind the ears! Horror and blood-curdling, unpardonable, killing wish to maim fueled me! I ripped my hair from my head in a futile effort to discard the image of Jake pawing and mauling Bella! My eyes darkened to a dark, dank, forest green, like the moss clinging to a hidden grotto, but not soft…not soft at all. Hard, jade, flinty, _fucked_.

I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from slashing across her soft, now-marred skin. Her lips were swollen from kissing that snout, her cheeks flushed from fucking someone else, her nipples still hard from the mutt nuzzling there! Every surface of her body called viral images of their mating to mind, images that raced like silent movie stills behind my wan lids…_FLASH, Bella wrapped around Jake…FLASH, Bella with her mouth on his prick…FLASH, Jake pummeling into her…FLASH FLASH FLASH._ The old fashioned Super 8 Kodak camera in my head would not stop its unbearable, torturous visions!

Jake had trespassed, had spread carnage across my lover's body. Worse than that, she had willingly let it happen, had even--_I could tell_--_encouraged_ such ferocity. Jacob, that ne'er-do-well! And that my Bella, my love, was with that rabid dog.

_OH GOD!_

More than devastated, deranged, distraught, I was disillusioned. I felt like I had just watched Houdini drown in his tightly locked tank of water. Felt like I was Houdini, dying, while the onlookers, the audience, kept applauding his talents until morbid realization finally hit and there was nothing anyone could do to salvage the situation.

Bella looked up only twice, her eyes widened and distraught. The brown of them distilled into a murky nothingness, her soul vanished. First, when I had dived forward only just stopping myself, and then when an inhuman growl followed by incomprehensible hisses roared into the guilt-laden air permeating _our home_.

With her demise calling me, my eyes bulged; at once propelled and repelled with this thought, her death.

Before the primal force could get an even firmer grip, I broke from the tight binding that held me in check. Fled from the house, nearly ripping the door off the frame in my haste to escape before the rampaging that stormed my impulses could catalyze me into an act that would hurt Bella bodily.

A snarl emitted my lips as I glanced just once more toward her broken-down, incapacitated shape huddling into the corner.

Once outside I looked around wildly, and lit upon the grey-blue house across the road that held my mortal enemy. Drawing two short breaths, fists clenched against the immutable need to hit, bitten-to-the-quick nails raked into my palms. I'd never felt such force, such power, such a surge of viscous, untamed, blood-curdling cruelty. I scrunched every muscle in my body against the brutal desire that swelled my veins, threatening to burst my head with the need to rush over there and slam my hands against his throat, shove his snout up into his brain with my palm, crack his cur's neck sideways so hard that his brain disconnected from his spine with one thrust. I knew just how to kill; speedily _and also _torturously.

Inhuman, sadistic scenarios filled my mind. Blinded by a bloody crimson red that veiled my eyes, I took off in a run in the opposite direction. I didn't have keys. Disheveled and wild, the whites of my eyes cracked through with red filaments. Demonic. Bella had made me a monster!

Not knowing where my feet took me, releasing myself into the pace that made my heart take to beating once again, I was mindless.

**A/N: **

**Get thee to my profile now to check out Bella's tattoo!**

**Bear with it folks! I know it sucks, and is painful but who doesn't crave a bit o' angst? Next chapter: What does devastated Edward do? Should be up next week y'all.**

**And why aren't you reviewing (she asked as she stamped her tiny Alice in Wonderland feet while eyeing up the rabbit's hole, preparing to jump)? Aw, hell, why aren't you even reading? **

**Meh.**

**In other news, check out Good & Plenty for ninapolitan's Cock/Twat Tease competition. It's fucking candy. And wet Edward! You might need a new pair of panties at the end of it.**

**Last bits, even if you despise this, put me on author alert as there is the most juicy never-fanfic-seen-before portrayal of Edward in the workings of my mad mind. All I can say is its going to be fuckloads of awesome! Think Dueling Banjos out for blood. **


	3. Tit for Tat

**Tit for Tat**

_A/N: Well, this is just sort of horrific. And hot. _

_Ta to vanessarae, the bangers and mash to my bubble and squeak! _

_Disclaimer: I own nada, just the idea for this terrible tryst._

* * *

Gasping for the breath that I did not even want to fill my lungs any more, I stopped, and self-immolation almost smote me on the spot. Looking up, glaring at the _Bud Is King_ and _Miller High Life_ signs shorting out in the smeared, greasy windows, I found myself at the dirtiest, scummiest bar in town. My body had brought me to the only solace. Alcohol, great quantities of hard liquor, and hot, vengeful, crude sex were the only salvation I could fathom at this moment.

Knowing the bar would be packed full of nauseating Laurens and Jessicas of my high school days, I crashed through the whinging door, and the bell that announced my arrival was drowned out by the din of drunken uproar.

I entered the dim depths of the skuzzy tavern. Belligerent and consumed by a need to exact revenge, which was the only thing-- besides sheer physical violence--making my blood boil like noxious venom and spiraling my deadened, newly stagnant heart out of my heaving chest, I took in the surroundings. A sneer flared my nostrils and curled my lips. My snobbish nature found itself in the tightly packed embrace of an inferno-like scene. Beer bellies, pitchers of cheap slop, a sticky floor that pasted the soles of my Cole Haans with god only knew what despicable expulsions. Unkempt and unshaven masses. _Not just the men_. Women with caked-on make-up as if they applied it with a spatula. Too-big blousy bodies pasted into too-tiny sparkly tops and jeans that were begging for an intervention.

I was not a drinker; that had been Bella's role. So I pounded back one shot after another of the house's finest single malt--which was not at all fine--and frankly fucking burned my gizzard all the way down. The gritty surface of the bar sickened me and gladdened me; it was just what I needed. Once I'd swilled back enough of that shit to brace myself against the peasant-like scene around me that I met with total denigration, I opened my mind. Observed. Looked. Hoped for something better to replace the fire that traced blazingly beneath my desiccated skin.

_She_ answered at once. Haughty. Literally standing head and shoulders above the rest.

Leaving a trail of weeping, zip-roaring men in her wake, _she_ was the one. The way every single man in that dive was paving a path after her and sniffing her sex-infused wake like she was a new formula of glue-getting-high that could only be a combination of pheromones and physical beauty that brought to my lunatic mind Bijou from Nin's masterpiece _The Queen_. Bijou: she who left men crying and smashed against the ground with want.

Bella had recently, teasingly, and so sensually read every short story of _Little Birds_ to me, keeping me at arm's length while she recited the erotic passages, her pupils dilated, legs crossed and just beyond my reach, her hair a tumble of tresses that I wanted to dive into headfirst. Inevitably, night after night, she finished her storytelling just short of breath before she glided so hotly against me. Story time with Bella had become a nightly ritual that made me rush from the hospital, hardly taking the time to wash the germs and putrefaction from my skin, jumping in my sleek silver Volvo that sped me home, hard as hell and hoping all the while that I was not too late. That she had not fallen too deeply asleep!

I needn't have worried. New Bella, voracious Bella, was always waiting, specs, book, and glass of wine at the ready, and simple white candles illuminating the divan upon which she reclined.

_UGH!_ _No!_ I pinched the bridge of my nose so hard that I almost shattered the cartilage in two. Fuck no! She was not going to intrude now, not after she'd…_not after…_

_Bijou_, she beckoned me. She _was_ a jewel; a diamond in the rough.

I found her. I'd always been aware of my charms but never used them on anyone other than..._her_. _She_ told me often that I inadvertently dazzled many a woman, her smile slightly tainted by a ridiculous jealousy, and I, so safe and secure within the tight web of our love, never even thought she would do this to me! Was I too cocky, too assured of Bella? Did I take her for granted? Had I made a gallery piece of her, idolized her too fervidly, perched her on a pedestal that she'd inevitably--being Bella--tumble from? Didn't fucking matter! I didn't even want to think that I had a part in this, her infidelity. I could not process that right now. I just needed to get my venge-fuck over with.

I crooked an eyebrow in her direction, _Bijou_. I let my lazy half-grin slide up my lips, the exact smirk that belonged to Bella alone. _Bella_.

With no desire to distill _her_ thoughts, I tuned in…and her inner ideas mirrored mine, right down the smugness, arrogance, the superiority I felt about these assjacks that stumbled around us, unaware of the tidal pull that brought me and this warrior queen to a standstill.

She was not impervious.

_She_ moved with sudden, distinct grace, pressing herself boldly against me, almost matching my height with her Amazonian stature. Statuesque, ferine, and a tall drink of water. I let my bottomless, desperate, jaded eyes plumb to her toes, which were encased in expensive peep-toe heels. Her clothes were impeccable, luxurious, tailored to showcase her lithe, unending frame. Long, straight, black hair fell halfway down her back. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on her. Everything about her screamed of exoticness. Huge, dark brown eyes, almost black, a long slim nose, and wide lips that were not so much lush as hinting at tropical rainforests. Her cheekbones were high and tight and she could have been a supermodel for all I knew! Skin the color of raisins, only this side of pale, foreign. The first sound of her voice shot through me even more harshly than the whisky I'd just imbibed, it was deep and rough and somehow _ready_.

I knew immediately, with predatory instinct, that she would be mine.

_Zafrina--Zaf_--as she intoned huskily, handled the Neanderthals' unwanted attention with style and aplomb, and just the slightest amused hint of belittling. They never knew what hit them, never saw it coming. But I did. Her voice, like honey that had been smoked out of the bee's hive, rough yet smooth, and pure, sizzling sex. Wordlessly proclaiming her penchant for prurient acts. She didn't have to say a word, and even if I hadn't been able to read her mind, I still would have understood the immediate, erogenous promise she extended to me.

Made for much better things than this boozed out bar, we were the only two here that fit each other. With her, I was guaranteed everything I needed. Everything I did not want. Had _never_ wanted to need.

With no other words spoken, with the heady, reeling rush of alcohol dampening every thought that had impelled me to this dive in the first place, I was in her apartment, in her bedroom, in her bed before I even, for once, thought twice.

In the blink of an eye, we were naked and scraping against each other with ridiculous ruthless need.

A villainess! She vilified me. She let me be felonious with her flesh. No questions asked and there would be no repercussions, at least not from her. Only from me. Because my thoughts would not be submerged. Because.

Because.

Because of Bella.

I wanted to wipe that name from the slate in my head, rub it out and then thwack the erasers clean of chalk dust. To be freed from it.

_She._

She.

She was Zaf.

And she was screwing me like banshee. She could only be a mystical succubus. I wanted her to rip me to pieces and make powder of my bones. Have done with me.

Not one bit demure

I did it in revenge. I was merciless. I was incensed. It turned me on. It turned me off. I didn't really even want it, and yet I wanted it so badly I could taste it, as if I was a vampire enamored with a new trace of a blood. Wanting to sink my teeth into Zaf, I needed to leave a mark. And the more I thought about Bella with that dog, the more desperate I was to have this jungle queen! She was sex personified. Not even pretty, just majestic. A superlative, strange creature.

Seeping in through the haze that enveloped me, thoughts of Bella would not be drowned out. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate. To give my full attention to this utterly trite moment of pure fucking! And the more I thought about Bella, the more I wanted to kill her. Senselessly fucking someone else seemed the better option.

**  
**Redoubling my efforts, I yanked Zaf's legs apart and dove in, tongue deep. But not before I smelt the racy, pungent, untamed scent of her. And not before I took one long look and lingered there. She was totally bare! That shit was waxed clean off; her lips shimmered and glimmered and lured me in, excited me. Plump. Pulsating. Unfamiliar.

_Bella_. Bella had tried it once, but being the self-proclaimed "Empress of the Bush", she was not thrilled with her denuded lips. Preferring her pussy to be crowned with a sculpted-yet-wild tangle of pubes, she incongruously strutted her sexy, moppy minge in front of me at every chance. And I loved the way it tingled against my nose, scratched my face as I ate her clean out.

_UGH!_ No Bella, _no_ Bella! _Bad Bella_. Bella was gone.

_Bella!_

Bella would not leave my head. Even while I wrapped my twisted lips and plunging tongue in and around the cunt of another woman.

Bella.

Beautiful.

Full, forthright, and flamingly hot.

Bella.

Ache.

Agony.

Ache.

_BELLA!_

Pain.

Focus. Focus.

Focus on these soft, hairless lips…I sank my pearly whites into her flesh, wanting to slash her limb from limb.

Instead I feasted on her gash. It was different. Zaf was different. And wild. Wily. Willful. Lusty. Tough. Unbreakable.

Every plunge of my tongue, every kiss of my wanting-to-scream lips was met by her wrecking-ball hips that met me in, pulled me out. This was the tongue Olympics!

I did my level best to win the gold in the Muff Diving event before I was gasping for a breather. Hands on Zaf's ass, I pushed her further forward until she deep throated me like a goddess and, _goddamn_, she sucked every inch of me. With her weeping minge in my face, I spread those plump, pre-pube-looking lips apart and plunged two fingers inside.

She was a woman of few words and that suited me just fine at the moment, but she was anything but mute with her throaty sounds! Animalistic snarls, like an unleashed tigress, her _sex_halations barged upon the ultra-sensitive skin of my shaft and 'nads as she continued to suck me deep and I endeavored to beat her raw with my fingers alone.

Through the mist, through the hunger, breaking apart the fog like sunshine parting the damp morning clouds, unlooked-for thoughts kept barging in. _Everything that Bella was not._ Not curvaceous, not bashfully brazen, not primly teasing as Bella was with her sexy secretary-type glasses and her minute, Saturniid tattoo, her innocent freckles that played across the button of her nose. Zaf's lips were not full and begging for a suck…not pliable.

Not my love.

Not my life.

Not my death.

_Not my wife. _

Just a fuck.

But there was no questioning. I discovered in my rampaging rage that I could mute Zaf's thoughts effortlessly. If only I could silence my own! I needed to tear all feelings of Bella from my head, from my heart. With distinct effort, this pussy pandering was beginning to do the trick.

I attacked briskly, with a goal, and that goal was to become mind-numbingly dissected. Wishing that I could think with my dick, I compelled all memories away. The moment. This moment alone.

More easily done than I had thought. Concentrating on the bare, Brazilian-waxed body splayed before me, I played. Like being let loose on a playground, enjoying all the rides. But not with the guiltless joy of a child. Consumed by the desire of a man who was bereft. Who realized that it was this or…_murder_. A frantic act of fornication.

We continued to assault each other, upside down, inside out. And it was like a crazy, plummeting seesaw! Up and down and in and out and her and me, _Zaf_ and me, not...not. Just _not_.

Plunging, perched on the edge of madness. Mother-fucking _fucking_ was the only thing keeping me. Keeping me…_alive_.

I shook my head ferociously! I assailed more viciously! Focus, breathe, focus, look, see, focus, lick, suck, _fucking_ _focus_.

Do. Not. Think.

Caramel skin beckoned me. Glorious. Smooth. Not one muscle or sinew or ridge or _anything_ out of place on her six-foot-tall idol's body! I licked her again, her cunt, swollen and light brown, tinged with the most shell-like pink, I rasped up her slim body, sucked her hard nodules into my mouth and bit hard at the barely-there flesh that surrounded them. Just like a Caramello, she was a dark, luscious, chocolate-coated exterior, and when I dipped two fierce fingers inside, lower, she was gooey, caramel…Caramello.

I.

I.

I lost the plot. Three Musketeers. Sad, sad Three Musketeers. Milk Chocolate. Earth brown, melted, milk chocolate coating that was Bella's eyes. Marshmallow. Inside. The softest marshmallow. _Bella_.

Bella.

_Bella_.

Pain.

Not an option. Not at all. Gone.

_Focus_.

Raising my unseeing eyes, forcing open the too-knowing green orbs that I wanted to rip from my skull, _begging_ the Greek Gods to tear my prophet's eyes out just as they'd done to Tiresias, I watched Zaf's body, _Zaf's _body, moving beneath my ungentlemanly caresses.

Gone gone gone.

Root beer floats. Bygone days. Creamy, rich, dark, frothy, and effervescent with her mocha mounds bobbing as I lip-locked her nipples once again and intensified my efforts to not recoil, Zaf shot her swan-neck back so that her stately head hung off the mattress and let loose an immortal scream. And that scream finally reached into my frozen body and sent blood, dusty dirty blood, into my prick. All of it. All of my blood. Leaving my brain, fleeing my heart, and swiftly flowing into my cock. So that my dick was finally doing all of the talking. And it was ragingly erect, atrocious, evil and beating against my stomach.

Sensing the change, Zaf propped up and snarled triumphantly. She latched onto my grim mouth. I opened; I opened because my mind was empty.

I palmed her mounds, she grabbed my sac, and I cried out in pleasure that was on the cusp of pain!

I felt something.

I needed to feel something. Even if it _was_ rapacious and ugly and revenge-fed.

And then she backed away, gripped my muscled thighs hard and high, and went straight to work on my rock-hard culm. Wreaking havoc all along my stalk, she was fierce and almost frightening. Outrageously afflicting my sublimely sensitive balls and shaft with her teeth, lips, tongue, fingers, nails…she raked through my ginger pubes, tore and lollipopped up and down in a frantic pace that left me with my calves quivering, the tendons in my ankles so tense that I knew Paris's arrow was about to pierce that vulnerable point. Gleaming brilliantly in the dusk that loomed into her perfectly chocolate-toned room, Zaf's incisors razored me. And she didn't so much swirl around my pipe as punish it vigorously, which was just what I needed at that moment! Falling back on my hands, every sinew of my arms, my chest, my throat, my abdomen stretched beyond reason, incapable of thought, insanely interred in the wet heat of Zaf's mouth my back arched, my neck broke, my voice shouted from the midpoint of my esophagus, "FUCK! _ME_! YEEEES!"

I expunged all thoughts of…of…of _her_ with the force of my jism that shot so hotly into the elegant, long, gazelle-like throat that still buried me deeply.

Stalking me like an un-caged animal, she bit the domain of my stomach, crawled up my chest, causing heated shivers to ripple across me until she was seated across my prick; her soaking wet, bare lips stroked over me, lathing a wet trail. Stoking me. No nibbling, no teasing. Just fucking sex incarnate. And mostly teeth and tongue.

Stone me! I was hard again and rearing to go. Gruffly, I flipped Zaf over onto her back and she writhed demonically. Possessed. I seized her tits and put my mouth to her.

Nips like dark chocolate Hershey's Kisses leftover from Halloween, begging to be devoured. Her breasts didn't bounce; there was too little flesh for that. She was small-chested; her bosom was the only thing dainty about her.

I was insatiable. I would _possess_ her!

I flung her against the nearest wall. The bed was too intimate. _Had Jake fucked Bella in his boy-sized bed?_ NO! No fucking way! _Get the fuck out!_

Realizing I could let loose, unleash, be crude and cuntish, I sneered through the fuck-lust that pounded me. I deftly avoided Zaf's attacking lips, latched onto the cleft of her collarbone and hauled her winding legs around my hips while battering her. A grueling pace was set!

Exotic, rippling, tight as all hell, not soft, not pillowy, and not fleshy…she was taut and solid. She was a Brazilian nut and I was going to crack her.

I banged and mashed against her inner walls. Ensnared. She bubbled and squeaked and parried every rock-hard, pussy-jarring thrust!

Throwing my head back, fiendish, I howled, I growled! The violence I wanted to impart on Bella's body turned to bloodlust, driven need, and I pounded into Zafrina over and over; someone _needed_ to bleed for this.

As I charged into Zaf, I found myself back at the playground; swings and roundabouts. Her nearly swaying tits hitting my pecs, her hips swiveling like a carousel, grinding against me, swallowing my shank into the rigid, ripe, golden, sugary folds that stiffened around my own inflexible, long, masterful, ever-growing fuck machine. Candy Land. I didn't stop to remember why I was playing these games.

Games had been played on me.

I felt the tightness in my cock running from the leaking tip of my head down through the beating vein that was my all-center, straight into my balls and to that tiny, welling ligament beneath. I was about to shoot the motherload!

Bending her supple legs yet wider, holding Zaf up by her opened thighs alone that I pressed into the wall behind her, I was hitting places I'd never been before. Exotic, foreign, new, wild and _oh the fuck_ so bare and flaming and drenched! Her quim shivered and sent liquid spilling all over me. Entrenched.

_Shoots and Ladders._ When I came, juice flew out with such force that I felt it searing a path, like a tsunami, upon the quaking walls that encased me. This tidal wave orgasm made me savage; I climaxed so completely from within the very depths of my grayed-out nothingness that I bit Zaf's thumping jugular with such vigor that I drew blood. _Spontaneous combustion!_ I was not sorry. I was done with sorry.

She was fucking and still working all over me and screaming and hissing and…and…_and..._

I tuned her out. I surrendered to the asshole that was me. _Now_.

I felt her release. And then her _release_ as she limped her entire giantess body over mine, unpeeling herself from the sumptuously papered wall.

And Zaf's body, with my dick still inside, was all kinds of the very worst wrong.

_Snakes and Ladders._ That's what I'd known it as, a child for a brief time in England.

Snakes.

Snake.

Jake.

Jake was the snake.

He'd had my woman.

And now this other woman was all over me and on me and me inside of her. Slowly, I pulled Zaf from me, disengaged from the puzzling depths of her that felt…felt…_felt so fucking wrong._

Extricating myself from our human pretzel embrace before I could implicate myself further, I tried to be chivalrous. Attempting politeness in the face of the _thing_ I had just done, I carried a limp Zaf to her bed and hefted her upon it. She was languid. A sigh and a twist found her burrowing into the covers and hill of pillows.

I felt foul.

I'd gone two innings and I was fucking out. Out. _Out of my mind!_

Sitting on the farthest edge of the mattress, I edged closer to unreason.

I looked back briefly to the body--not a person, not to me--that I'd just defiled. Disgraced. Ashamed of myself.

Hung my head.

Took in my state of dishabille.

Seeking out my clothes, I raised myself. Head still hanging, fucking pathetic, mortified, stupid, appalled. More than anything, appalled!

Supinely, Zaf stretched, mewled, and rolled into the warmed space I'd left dented into the feather-soft mattress.

_Foul_, I was a foul beast.

I didn't feel disgust at Zafrina. Only revulsion for the disingenuous act I'd just committed. Repulsed at myself.

I felt like Dracula, but more humane. Knowing I'd just performed an atrocity and seeing with monstrous insight the far-reaching consequences that it implied.

Mustering the only bit of gentleness I could find within the all-reaching dreadfulness that now seeped into and spilled over my being, I leant back to pull the silken coverings over Zaf's bare, brown body.

Stricken, I dressed.

Divine retribution, that's what I'd had in mind. It was anything but divine…._ There's no justice in this world, and there never was._ Well color me just plain fuck-stupid. Tit for fucking tat; ignorant, juvenile, damaging!

My own reflection called to me from the mirror perched on Zaf's sleek modern dresser. A washed-out desolate man looked back at me. Eyes leeched of color. Grim mouth devoid of feeling. Hair standing on end, a ludicrous young Einstein. I could never claim to be a genius. I'd quite possibly just fucked the last bit of love out of my life with Bella.

Portentous.

Pitiable.

Pained.

Bella. I was her first, _had been_ her only. I'd played about a bit more because I could; I was a teenager so I did. But Bella was my one true love. My forever in this life. Even in death, I felt sure that our souls would meet up, conjoin, and become one infinitely.

Even through infidelity.

I was so stupid. So short-sighted. Myopic.

Extinguished, I left.

I stumbled from Zafrina's apartment building and counted myself lucky that she lived on a busy, inner-city block. Cabs whizzed past at startling speed. Luck, _ha_, perhaps I'd never been lucky. Just blind. Just egotistical and self-satisfied.

I didn't look at the street sign or the apartment number. Needing no reminder, I never wanted to see Zafrina again.

I couldn't run back. I could hardly even walk. And I needed to get _home_.

Stumbling to the sidewalk's edge, I hailed a taxi. I couldn't talk, I could hardly even think. I mumbled _our_ address. Shrouded in grief, I folded into myself. No longer the portrayal of that complacent man I'd been twelve hours earlier.

And after it all, just wanting to get back to Bella. And hating her. And not hating. And pure misery…wondering if I had caused her to turn to another man; if I was so wrapped up in my own insular world that I had missed all the warning signs.

The cabby's light flashed on and off with my escalated fare. We'd stopped curbside. I was _home_. Unthinkingly, I threw a wad of cash at this man who just looked at me with the omniscience of a ubiquitous bartender, reading the truth, the lies, the debaucherous fairytales he witnessed on a nightly basis with ease. Shrinks had nothing on cabdrivers and bartenders.

Unbending myself from the trapped, smoky interior, I placed my feet onto the grassy verge of our lawn. The car that disclosed me accelerated up and around the cul-de-sac before passing me and turning off to the right.

My vision unobscured, I saw Jake's house. Lights off. Middle of the night. And not twelve hours had gone by since he'd screwed my wife.

Turnabout's fair play, right? That was just fucking wrong. What a lie.

Staggeringly, cementing me in place, I wondered for the first time if this had been a one-off for Bella! Had there been more? Was I really that sightless? Was this only the beginning, or the start and end note of her indiscretion?

And mine.

I just wanted to get back to that which belonged to me. Always had. Always would.

Bella.

She would hate me, she would hit me, I'd defiled us and she'd punctured the bubble that safeguarded us.

But.

_But._

But she was mine. I was hers. I no longer cared that she'd done the unthinkable. _Almost_. Spread her legs, unveiled her breasts, and lifted her body to another. Just once. _Oh God_, I hoped! Just. Once!

I loved her. Through it all. I could not accuse her. _Almost_. Not now. Certainly not now. I wouldn't defend her.

I thought, I hoped, I wished, I prayed that I could forgive her.

Could she forgive me?

I shuddered. I almost vomited beneath our mailbox, on the burgeoning blossoms of gold and brown lantana that edged this flower bed.

Thoroughly sickened.

I'd always had everything I wanted. Should I complain? Could I complain? Had I taken her for granted? Was I at fault? My mind was boggled and overloaded and I just needed to flip the circuit breaker to shut it all down before I puked my guts out all over our front yard.

That's exactly what I did, flipped the switch on my never-ending thoughts, letting all impulses loose, and they brought me straight to Jake Black's front door, the door that my own wife had beaten her hasty retreat from not half a day earlier. I wanted an axe. It was most definitely a good thing that I did not possess nor condone the use of a firearm because that violence came right back to grip me by my balls!

I staggered across the road, pounded my fist against his darkened door so hard that my knuckles bruised and swelled immediately. Lights came on from the neighbors' houses and every dog in the vicinity started to bark. Just about to shout his name and demand entry, the door was flung open and a shame-faced (rightfully so) Jake appeared.

No thought, no thought at all! I grabbed him by the scruff, punched him so powerfully in the face that the skin on my knuckles ruptured and blood spewed out and spattered my white, rumpled shirt! Almost foaming at the mouth, I spat on him and hurled, "Stay the fuck away from my woman, mongrel!"

* * *

_A/N: Next Chapter, EPOV and BPOV, will be up in a few weeks. Sorry for the wait y'all!_

_And check out Good & Plenty (Cocktease, Contest, Candy, Yum)!_

_And in that vein, if you've read some of my others, you're probably sensing a theme:_

_Sex_

_Food_

_Schmex_

_Nosh_

_Eh, Bangers and Mash, Bubble and Squeak…good old English fare, but not as good as haggis!_


	4. Take a Bow

**Take a Bow**

**Check out Take a Bow by Muse, on my profile. **

**Super duper thanks to vanessarae; she rocks my socks off and puts my disjointed pieces into place. Could not do this without my V!**

**Disclaimer: This mangled Bella, that's all I own. **

* * *

I don't know how long I sat there. My ass was numb straight through. Shaking, shaken, in shock. My mind was not as anesthetized as I needed it to be, still too agitated to shut the hell up. Was it possible to feel your own heart--that pulsing, throbbing, blood-engorged organ that fueled life--breaking? _Yes._ Mine was tearing in two and the meaty shredding of that juicy thing that would not stop galumphing in my chest wanted to burst through my ribcage!

No ability, no right to feel pity. I could not expect mercy.

I had reaped what I'd sown.

I had cuckolded Edward.

I was anything but righteous.

_Could you see another's heart being ripped to shreds? _

Yes, you could. When Edward had heard my scrawny words, when he had raised his long lashes to unveil the traumatic terror beneath, when he had come so close to detaching from the last vestige of gentlemanliness--_the one thing that I had thought I wanted but _not_ in this manner, not by a long shot_!--I'd heard the resounding rending of his heart that split him asunder. His torso tensed and his hands wanted to beat me. The violence spurred by the spurning of his wife. Of me. Then his eyes, the window to his spirit, his breathtakingly wholesome being, simply faded. The chasing, dancing, golden flecks hidden amongst the apple green extinguished. And that apple green itself turned rotten, eaten through by the worms of my impurity.

I'd thought I was being a vixen. I was no more than a rat.

No matter what I'd convinced myself of, this was no peccadillo, no mere dalliance that I could conceal, sweep under the heavy pile of our Oriental rug on which stood the trappings of our lives together. I glanced chillingly around the living room. Still on my ass, kicked in the stomach, stinking of fucking Jake, strafing through vitriolic emotions that would not die down and take their leave.

My haunches were desensitized.

My thoughts were not.

My witchery had cursed us. The devastation could not be more physical nor more incorporeal had I taken straight pins to tiny emblematic voodoo dolls of me and Edward!

The ramifications of my hex were yet to be divined.

The cold from the bare floorboards. The cool air from outside seeping beneath the black rubber underpinning of the door. Time tocked slowly on without my reckoning it.

My sin turned me to stone. Alone. Wondering what Edward's retaliation might be.

I wanted the lintel to crash down upon me. Where was an extreme act of God when you needed it? Where were the floods, the earthquakes, the locusts, the Apocalypse? The End of Days? A cataclysm to correspond with my own calamitous activities?

_What was my revelation? _

Edward and his goddamn glorious jade eyes, he saw right through me! I had never meant to tell him or even feel _anything_ about this. Truth be told, I _didn't_ feel anything. I was hollow, carved from the inside out, caving in on myself. There'd be no repeat performance with my stud jockey across the road; that was over. My initial thrill quickly dissipated. Abuzz replaced by gnawing fear. One look at Edward's face, that fucking pure love that always lived there, only made me sneer. I wanted to tear his gorgeous eyes out of his head so he could never see me again, not this beast that I had become. I wanted to stomp on his heart so he would never love me again. I couldn't even meet his gaze. With succinct, roughly-whispered, barely-there words, I told him _everything_!

Yeah take a fuckin' bow Bella….you idiot! You're no good, no thespian, no actress. There'd be no standing ovation, no encore, no clapping, no congratulations…and my name might be in lights, but only in Soho. As a cheap whore. A floozy. Fluorescents short-circuiting. With the conflagration of my confession, minute though it was --nothing more than Jake's name coupled with mine, my hands conjoining to elucidate the idea of our fucking-- all was made clear. My masquerade lay bare. Not even an attempt at a charade. In an instant I had doused every pure ideal Edward had palisaded around me. The citadel of our enduring love was made timely. It was riddled through with holes of my making. Falsehood made a mockery of the fortress that had been Bella and Edward.

Didn't matter what my intentions had been. Not one iota. It was of no consequence that I thought—_naïvely_--I could fuck another man and get away with it. One profound look from Edward to me, to my distorted face and my out-of-shape limbs hinting to the touch of someone other than himself, and he could see the truth. For all that he couldn't read _my_ mind, Edward could bloody well unravel the telltale disingenuousness out of my every gesture and expression.

Un-suctioning myself from my cemented and stagnant stance hunkered over onto the baseboard, I slunk off to the bathroom. I felt ghoulish. A hobgoblin. A gargoyle. My skeletal wings starving to beat and propel me away, not up but down, down, _down_ into Hades; claws tensed, my features sunken. Teeth bared. An otherwordly demonic representation of the Bella that had been blessed.

Everything I had known, I had corrupted. I brought death. I was the harbinger of all the ills of the world.

And self-commiseration still thought it could make its presence known.

_No fucking way_. I was a fiend and I deserved every single chastisement that Edward reaped upon me. I would welcome it. If only he'd come home!

My inner, irrational, rebellious teen was stupefied, silenced, in permanent detention, expelled. Flunking the fuck out. Of this marriage. For what? For a whoregasm? Well, several to be truthful, but that didn't matter. It was all for naught. Less than zero. I was nil. Null and void.

I'd been suicidal. I had completed an asinine kamikaze mission. I deserved to die in the long, slow, painful Japanese fashion of hara-kiri. But even seppuku, that Japanese ritual of self-disembowelment was too tame a retribution for what I'd done.

_And I'd done it why?_

Because I was bored? Because I thought this life would end with me and Edward, never having been with another? Because I could? Because, quite simply, most selfishly, I _wanted_ to? Those reasons were not justifiable, not in the least.

My raison d'être had been Edward since the first moment I'd tripped over my silly size six feet and landed against his pulchritudinous chest. Aged 15, never having been noticed before. A misfit, a transplant, a small fish in a wide ass sea, and on my first day I had stumbled into the most divine, divining human being to ever walk the earth! And most stunningly, amazingly, outrageously, _he_ had instantaneously latched onto me. Not just to halt my fall. To reciprocate the awe, the rampant teen lust, the _good god!_ enormous swelling of heart and soul smashing into another's heart and soul. And body. _Oh lord his body_! As a man, full grown and fully capable, Edward was transcendent. As a boy on the cusp of that manhood, he had been swaggering. Arrogant. At once out of touch with his magnetism and yet oddly sensually bound to me. And so, so sexy and knowing. As if he was meant to be inside of me. From that very first clumsy clashing of awkward adolescence.

My touchstone. My steadying factor. My solstice and gravitational pull. When all else plummeted around me, Edward had been there. Solid. Rock solid. Granite. Stone. Unmovable. Unshakeable. At my side. Taking my shit. My insecurities. My ceaseless nightmares caused by the wrecked tumbled down shack of my home life.

Bearing me up.

Buttressing me.

Buffeting me.

Fashioning a whole out of the half-person I was.

Me and him.

Together.

_One_.

He mesmerized me. I could not quite ever believe that Edward Cullen was with Bella Swan. That I was his chosen. It took nine years together, through the remainder of high school, college, med school before I felt safe that this mythical creature would not leave me. Five years of marriage billeted me in the most beatific of loves, safe as houses and just as secure. Nothing Austen could ever have written would come close to touching the enormity, the eclipse, the earth-shattering peacefully triumphant feeling!

And then another five years found me playing dirty. Biliously. Bile swilled around my throat from the recesses of me empty stomach. Gnawing and corroding.

_Why?_

Because of Edward's inability to talk dirty? His disavowal of my sailor's mouth? His goodness, his charmed upbringing, his giftedness, his generosity, the silver spoon in his magnificent mouth that he never ever ate from without giving thanks where thanks were warranted? Everything about Edward was diametrically opposite to me. Made me lesser, suddenly. So I thought. Until I found a new dimension within myself that was separate from the completed conundrum that was us. A part of Bella that had never existed before. Someone _else._ Confident, sexy, superior, _on my own_.

Not simply as Edward's wife. Not solely Edward's wife.

I'd wanted to be on my own.

And now I was.

_Why?_

Because the past year had found me restless, because the things that used to be endearing had become a sudden irritant.

And my renunciations lead me to this entropy.

I stood at the vanity and glared at myself. Questioning myself. A catechism that had no answers.

Quixotic Edward. Romantic. Chivalrous. Even having been reared with the finest richest spoils at his command, he had eschewed the antique silver platter of debutantes galore and chosen me instead. Visionary, beholden to the thoughts of others, claiming that I, Isabella Cullen nee Swan, was the only woman to define him. To change him. In the one instance of my faltering feet, _I_ alone had spelled an unbreakable transformation within his aloof nature that was permanent. _Me and him._

And I had everlastingly broken it.

Never once mawkish. Not contrived. Triviality was not a bedfellow with Edward. He was sincere in all things. The most heartfelt of all husbands and friends and lovers!

The destruction I had wrought with one feckless act was more than gut-wrenching, it eviscerated me! _Oh fucking god!_

I invariably came like J.H. Christ or Mary or _whoever_, in his mouth, all over his dick, limbs trembling, eyes tearing.

More than that, _oh fuck's sake, so much more than that_, I loved him whole. Completely. With my soul. My stupid, forsaken, going to Hell for sure soul.

With the opening of my treacherous legs and the unfolding of my ignorant, lusty fuck fantasies, I had killed us. Just as surely as if I had taken razor-sharp vampire teeth to our conjoined jugulars. I was watching the life force spill and spew from the sanctity of Bella and Edward's love. I deserved to die. I wanted to be killed. My eyes were dismal; my face pallid, my heart…_my heart_ no longer existed. It had dropped to the floor in Jake's bedroom alongside my panties. It was irretrievable unless Edward was somehow, unrealistically, able to forgive this monster indiscretion.

Stupid-ass whore, infidel, cheating, un-worthy wife.

What the fuck had I done?

Edward had left, uncharacteristically slamming the door so hard the brick and mortar of our house shook with the force. I could only imagine that he really wanted to hit me. And that he was off to search for someone else to slam into. With little regard to Jake's state of mind, I hoped Edward would go pummel him to the ground simply so that he wouldn't be hunting for some other woman to get even with. Even though Jake didn't deserve it, I was still that selfish. I'd rather have innocent Jake punished by my husband than to have my mate do exactly what I'd done.

_Fuck someone else. _

Not even wanting to contemplate _that_ thought all the while knowing I deserved my penance no matter what form it tookl

My nostrils flared and quivered. My lips blanched. Pulled tight. Desolation.

I was on tenterhooks waiting for him to come back. So tightly drawn that I was completely withdrawn. A specter.

And I had to face the bald fact that I didn't even know if he would return to this harlot's hovel.

My broken body defiled even the mirror in the bathroom and I was unable to look at myself. I turned the lights off and groped my way to the shower, turning it on full hot. Scathing under the searing, pounding spray I scrubbed the shit out of my skin until I was as raw on the outside as I felt on the inside. Still sullied. I wrangled with my fucking hair, the tresses that Edward snuck his nose into looking to deliver himself from a hard days' work in my fruity, long, wavy, chestnut locks. Even the conditioner worked against me! Self-pity was trying to hold a party for me; all was wrong. Nothing was right in this world. But I was the errant bitch that had made it so. Sympathy had no place here.

Exiting the steamed shower door, slamming it so that it shuddered on its track and threatened to crack from baseline to top, nasty and naked, I took up the shears I used to trim the snagged lengths that brushed past my cretinous shoulders. The whiny mechanism of the scissors fought me. All was pitted against me. No place for feeling sorry for myself.

Hardened.

Carapace.

Scarab.

I flicked on the light.

With a creak and groan I forced the blades apart and forged them against the gathered shanks of my thick hair. Hacking it off haphazardly. To my shoulders. Shorter than it had been since I was a naïve twelve year old, a silly, clumsy kid who thought, even through the hateful home life that I endured, that the future--once freed of my parents niggling, vicious, nightly shouting matches--was mine for the taking.

And it had been. When I met Edward. The world was my oyster and he was the man, then only just out of boyhood, who had delivered it to me. For twenty years. Every single fucking day since I had so fortuitously, gauchely, fallen against him!

Shorn, I laughed half mad, realizing I'd just pulled a Britney! At least it was not in the full-on, blinding spotlight of the media. And I had not gone totally bald. Good God, was I not even as fucking bold and brave and fuck-stupid as that trashy teen pop icon? I eyed Edward's clippers maliciously. They stood between me and Mrs. Clean. Only the harsh fluorescent glow of our coiled energy saver bulbs lighting the jagged edges of my sad 'do made me think thrice about such stupidity.

Crazed hilarity was cut short. As abruptly as my hair. The last lengths of which coasted to the cold marble floor, floating on the hazy humid air that had spilled from the shower, landing like autumn leaves, red and brown and gold in drifts on the black tiled pallet beneath.

With the light came sight. Second sight. Foresight. I wished I'd been privy to hindsight.

Scars and imprinting from Jake's marks on my body.

Jake and his fucking hangdog expression when I'd left him on the landing of his stair. Bare and huge and suddenly looking all of his paltry young years. I was screwed in several thousand ways and none of them pleasant any longer.

The bruises. The fingerprinting. Like I was a felon. I _was_ a villainess. Electrocution was too lenient a castigation for me. These markings were vile. I could do nothing to curb the ever-growing purplish pigmentation from spreading across my sad sallow skin, taking the form of Jake's fingers, Jake's hands, Jake's lips that had sucked so hard. Highschoolish hickeys littered the defiled crags and gorges of my body. Not dells, not swells. Not valleys nor swales. I was made hard and tough and jagged to the touch by this deed that I had done. This act I had encouraged. This vain _fucking_ that I had pursued.

Only flaying, flogging, a horsehair shirt and self-mutilation and self-flagellation could scrape away those tissue-deep etchings that revealed the path of Jake's stalwart wanton wanderings all over me.

_You'll burn in hell for all of your sins._

Even if Edward came home he would be disgusted anew at the sight of me. Like this.

I wanted him to be. I warranted it. My "just desserts". I'd made my bed…I'd had another man in his stunted single bed.

How could Edward ever love me, ever even touch me, caress me, worship me, revere me again?

Would he even come home?

_What if he never came home?_

To this den of iniquity. _And shame._

I was the undead. Unable and unwilling to sleep. Inert and incapable of movement. I kept my vigil. Knowing I would sit in this exact same spot, rotting, rooted, decaying until I saw Edward's face again.

Enervated. Wasted. Ruinous, a destructress.

And Edward's face, when he did finally return, was bleached of color, blanched paler than his stark, starched, white Oxford. The shirt that was now emblazoned with spatters of metallic iron drops, like a Pollock masterpiece in the making, all crimson splotches on a pristine ivory backdrop. The canvas of Edward's magnificent soul that I had bloodied with one puerile act.

He didn't look at me. He was wasted. I had wasted away into nothingness in his eyes. Undeserving of even rage, hate, or jealousy! And the thin fragile skein of hope that had ruched through me at his homecoming was negated with his one action of tossing that ruined shirt in my direction. So that I might see and smell and torture myself over the images of his reprisal. I'd been shafted.

I recoiled. I scuttled like a fiddler crab, my body thrown off balance by the need to hate him weighting one hand, while the compulsion to fucking kill myself on the other hand threatened to topple me over. Gathering up his bedraggled shirt, the buttons of which had skittled across the gleaming floor, the only clean thing between us.

Totally fucked up and unable to stop myself, I tenderly gathered that fabric to treat with stain remover in the laundry room. A Stepford Wife in the making. Idle hands were the devil's playground. And there was nothing more for me to do. Completely warped and descending to another level of shock. Awe. Hurt almost didn't touch me.

_Edward was home!_

Sniffing at his collar. Like an animal. Suddenly smelling the alien perfume there.

_Edward's shirt was rank._

I recoiled at the trace of another woman's cum lingering on the tails of his shirt!

The idea destroyed me. _Ravaged me._

Edward had blazed right through the foyer and up the stairs, stopping only enough to shove his tart's trophy under my nose. Barreling straight to the bathroom and leaving me with this odorous scent that flared my nostrils. Relieved that he was back, I was fucked that he smelled of porn. Doused, soused, and sloshed in someone else's sex! Thinking of that revolted me ten thousand times more than I reviled myself!

I was indignant! I _was_ self-righteous!

And I wanted Edward to suffer right alongside me. How could I not? I'd already demonstrated my utter selfishness. He had retaliated with unexpected force and I hated that more than my own actions! Edward was _mine_!

I just wanted him to fight me, fight _with_ me, fight _for_ me! Fuck me. Brutalize me. Anything, _anything at all_ would be better than this robotic cyborg, this other Edward who blanked me out, destitute of emotion.

Penuriously, chafing, released from my gargoyle's stance, from my lackluster short-lived probation, I stormed after Edward, leaving just enough time that he might shed that slitherish-skin, the spewage of another woman from his body. That musculature, that sinew and ligature and lean taut build that bloody well belonged to _me_! This wasn't over.

What had _he_ done?

What had _I_ done?

Ornery. Onerous. Heavy, burdened with the weight of both our wrongdoing and fucking pissed off, I flung the bathroom door open. Hot mist swirled out, a fog of heat that blinded me before it swam out into our bedroom. Leaving a vacuum. A settled air the belied the lifelessness, the rage, the horror, the harrowing half-thread of love that still lingered beneath it all. And my clumps of hair remained smattered upon the floor sticking to Edward's bare feet in infinitesimal reddish-brown strands. Bits of me stuck to him. Not going to be brushed aside. And naked. Nude and beautiful. And mine. Still mine. _Please Edward, still be mine!_

I stared at his mirror image. My other half. Taking up half the mirror. Reflecting my treason back at me. Backfiring. Wishing he could backpedal. Just like me. Always me. Me and him. Bella and Edward.

Pissed off, culpable, and criminal.

I really just wanted to kick him, slap him, smack him, and punch. _Hard_.

And hug him, lick him, love him, reclaim him. Force his hand; make him face _me_ instead of my licentious likeness, the echo of former myself.

I was headed for the slammer.

I shored myself up. I'd walk headlong into the nuclear fallout if it meant Edward would _see_ me again.

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**If you've gotten this far, bless you! The final two to three chapters should ****be forthcoming. Within the next two weeks or so. **

**UPDATE: There's this group of absolutely in-fuckin'-credible women (both here and on Twi) who are shooting the shit with yours truly on a thread for Comeuppance at TwilightedDOTnet. Come on over and bring your music and eye candy!**


	5. The End of Something

**The End of Something I Did Not Want to End**

_**Empty Cans**_** by The Streets**

_**The end of something I did not want to end**_

_**The beginning of hard times to come**_

_**But something that was not meant to be is done**_

_**And this is the start of what was.**_

**See end A/N for my long-ass lame-ass attempt at explaining my rationale for this tale and other assorted goodies.**

**This is written in both BPOV and EPOV. In some places you might not be able to tell who is talking, that was deliberate…they are each experiencing the same nightmare.**

**Ta to vanessarae, my very own guardian angel (well, she's a bit devilish too!).**

**Disclaimer: Me, ownership, Twilight…nope!**

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**Bella**

Facing Edward in the mirror, wrapping my desolate and drowned brown eyes around his ever-majestic bare body, my hand flitted up to wind from his shoulders--which were so tense they almost met his ears--to follow the track of his hilled muscles from clavicle to spine, winding out to his indented ribcage, then down along the small of his back and onto his sweet ass. _But my hand remembered_. Too late and in the knick of time, with a lick of flame, my hand remembered and pulled back right before it whined through the air to slap his prominent cheek on that vacant visage that he had turned away from my own. His reactions deadened. He didn't even flinch while the form of my fingers reddened the eerie, pale skin of his face that was drowning in tears long dried up through incarcerating rage.

Caustic. Callous. Contaminated.

I was deflecting instead of reflecting, in the place of taking and owning my blame in this fiasco.

Edward was unnerving in his unmoving, steadfast, rigid stance.

I pounded his back with fists that were craving to unclench and hold tight!

My throat was ablaze with disuse and unshed tears, choked tight and chalky. My voice, when it found sound, was dusty, diminished, and gravelly like an old dirt road; unpaved, ungraded.

"What's her name?" It came out hardly a noise. An insignificant whisper ringing loudly in this tomb. His reply was to shake his head; a warning.

"What was her _NAME_?" This time a shout bursting from me!

Lifting his once-bright eyes to mine, dank and dirty, a rasping reedy noise, "Zaf. Zafrina."

Edward's defeated voice admitting _that_ name made it real, made me hysterical!

"Did you enjoy yourself?" I bellowed! Enraged, how could he have done this to me? Beside myself, and I had every right to be. I had absolutely _no right_ to be. This was all mine.

How could I have done this to him, to us?

"What of you, Bella? Did you _enjoy_ yourself?"

I'd meant to go into this _whatever it was_ with eyes wide opened. Turns out they could not have been more unseeing had I stitched them closed myself.

"I hate you!" I was livid and shaking.

"I love you." I whispered, collapsing beneath the internal pressure of guilt that tried to make way for virtuous ire.

I was met by silence and a doomed stare. Edward was still holding himself upright with his palms on the cold vanity, every sinew a peak, his head hanging down between his shoulders, his eyes the only glow, dusky though they now were, the only hint that life still thumped within him.

With the same voice, with the same heart, with the selfsame body, pushing away and pulling back all at the same time, I screeched, "I wish I was dead, I want to kill you_, I love you_, I will never disgrace us again!"

Verbal vomit ranted from my lips and I could not stop the words that fled me, "Hurt me, revile me, and despise me! Love me, never leave me! Stay, _oh god,_ please, please stay! Be mine, _be mine_, stay with me…"

"I need you," I admitted.

"I want you." I hated myself for that declaration. But looking at him, knowing him but not knowing _this_ Edward, reaching for him and shoving him away with all of my words and instincts, my body insistently yearned for his.

His head rested against the glass, blocking me from view, grinding his brow against the obscured image of us. "I can't touch you," Edward's voice breaking, a crack in his ambivalence. _Touch_.

"Touch me! Hit me, hurt me! Anything, please anything! I'm begging you…feel something…" I groveled.

"Your skin…," I leaned in closer, almost _touching_, to make out his murmur, feeling like an intruder in this montage of a man brought to his knees, "Your skin is damaged."

It was worse than a slap to the face. I balked. He was right! I turned away, wrapped my arms around myself, bent over and almost retching.

"I'm damaged goods." Realization.

"Don't look at me! Don't touch me!" While in the same breath, begging, "Please, I need you. Make me yours, Edward! I am yours; I've always belonged to you. _Please_."

While I'd turned away, Edward had slowly swiveled to me. Breaking away from the bathroom, limping with arms hanging slack, "Bella, look at me. Bella, _look at me_." He was at my back. The distance determined not to be spanned. Sidelong, I viewed him over my shoulder as he continued, "We're equals now. I've done what you did," his nostrils flaring in distaste at his own actions and me spitting and hissing, "We will be never be the same!"

Did he think that by fucking someone else, this _Zaf_, that he had leveled the playing field? All he'd done was fucked us up further, as if I _needed_ him to remind me that my misconduct had goaded him into screwing another woman! Unjustly justified I stood my ground, full of an adrenaline rush from his acknowledgment of what he'd done, "God I fucking hate you! You've ruined me!"

_I love you. _I thought it.

"Bella, I love you." He said it.

Bedlam beat through me. Torn in two. I loved him. _I love him_. "I love you, Edward."

As if my proclamation was impetus for new pain, his face became mangled anew, "Then how could you fuck that dog, that boy? _Why did you do it_?"

Fresh denial, skidding down the slippery slope of resentment, "How could _you_?" I sneered. Facing Edward full-on.

It was as if I had sucker punched Edward in the gut again. He paled one shade further in the spectrum of white. Face crumpled, lips bleached and stretched tight, fists at his hips and legs apart, and still fucking superlative in all of his nakedness! Snarling, jade eyes flaming a ferrous, oxidized green, "I can't understand. I can't think about it. I can't see it. _I don't want to see you_. Go away! Leave me!"

Because he had just given me an out. A free pass. And I'd ripped it to shreds in front of his face. He'd admitted to being as wicked and despicable a human being as I was and all it had done was pissed me off further and allowed me my impious, impetuous posturing!

I was aghast, "Don't go. Don't go! I need you. I want you. _You are mine_. We _are_ the same! Stay. _Stay_. Let me_. Just let me_. Please."

Too late. The spark of gold in his orbs was spirited away.

"Let me be," Edward whispered, quiet, again.

I shook my head. _No_. No, I would not go away. He would have to leave me.

Impaled by the utter wrongness of all of my deeds, all of my words, impotence wended over Edward. But I was not giving way. And the finality of it all finally unhinged him. Hemorrhaging from the inside out, visibly oozing, he hardened. _He hardened._ He wrestled the clothes from me, and not with a lover's gentle languorous touches. _His_ boxers, _his_ t-shirt. I'd delved into the hamper of dirty laundry and pulled out the work-out clothes he'd last worn to shroud myself in. Needing to smell him. Feel him. Not knowing if he'd ever be that close to me again, if his soiled clothes were all I had left of the spring-like, cedar, musky smell of him. I'd had no shame. Again.

And the taunts, the tainted pleas, the begging, the hating, the loving, the desire and lust, and pure, pure, true passion circling it all as we circumvented each other, nude and bared and soulless and soulful and sedated and soaring and falling and beating and spilling and putrid and distraught and trying, _just trying_ to find the smallest bit of something that was still us. The underpinning. The structure. The steeliness of Edward's arms. Bringing me close and holding me at distance.

At least he was awake. Alive. And here. No longer mute.

"I'm yours," I sobbed, wretched, wrenching, heaving, dry heaving. The hatred and the love. Both of us.

What came next was a furious flurry of spiteful words and spiritual statements and wordless declarations, rapid quick-fire so that it was impossible to tell who spoke what.

"Why? Why are you mine? Why were you ever mine?"

"I love you. I'm yours. _I'll always be yours_."

"You don't see yourself, Bella." Somber. Weighty. Wizened. Whispering. "You are the world. You are _my_ world."

"I know." _I know._

I know that now.

Betrayed and beholden. The both of us, with me to blame. I needed to shoulder the world. I needed to be Herculean in my effort to get through this night, this life, to put this love back together again.

"I love you."

"I hate you."

"_Please_ love me."

A jagged, crying, sobbing mess of love and sex and revulsion and ….

…and he still managed to smell wholesome despite the cruel course he had taken. I was completely foul.

We were paving a new way. Possibly. Perhaps.

"Can you stay?"

"Will you stay?"

"Be with me."

Beat me. Hurt me. Haunt me. Deride me. Just don't let _us_ die, don't look at me as if my demise has already taken place. "I'm here! I am right fucking here!"

"See me! Look at me! These bruises, these fuck-suck marks are not yours. Love me. Despise me. Just please don't deny me!"

Suddenly I knew I had to bear the brunt of this blame. Foiled and fallen, glazed over, Edward's actions were only in reaction to my own. I needed to find strength I'd only ever assigned to him before. To be stronger. This was all mine!

**Edward**

I was a cretin, a wretch.

I thought I could be cavalier.

Bella's actions did not excuse my behavior. Her fucking that animal had not given me an automatic, all-access pass to do what I did.

I didn't understand; I couldn't forgive and forget.

Neither did it mean she didn't owe me an explanation, an apology, _something_ other than this harpy that harangued me! Didn't Bella know? Couldn't she see that with just two words this could begin to change?

For now I was content to let the flickering tendrils of flame lick my combusting skin. Lifeless. A burning man. A broken man.

I was at once dastardly and greedy, needing to know!

I asked her, my hands reaching towards her neck of their own volition, "Was _he_ the first? Was _he_ the only?"

I scoffed, my heart breaking once more, awaiting an answer I did not really want to hear. I could read the tangent emotions scattering across Bella's face -- _Forgive me. Forsake me. Deny and descry and denounce me! I deserve it!_ – but could not make out the answer.

"Jake Black was the only. Yesterday was the single time. There is no other. He's nothing! _Forgive me._ Feel me!" His name on her lips was firm. Causing us both to flinch.

Reaching out to caress her, my fingers remembered before they made contact, remembered what had brought us to this precipice, and what started as connubial convergence transformed into a grab. But I gripped only the air, not Bella's beautiful hair. Her hair was gone, no longer a swaying curtain of dark red-brown and strawberry fields and honesty and purity. Hacked off.

Chopped off, crooked tresses of hair made it only to her round shoulders. My hands raised, hovered, lunged forward and into the lopped off locks, ripping what was left, wanting to yank it all from its anchor in her scalp!

I cried out, destroyed and contrite, "Bella, _my_ _Bella_, what did you do?"

My soul gasped at the sight of her shorn locks and I finally grasped the meaning of the ticklish threads on the bathroom floor that had pasted to my feet. Revolted, as if her hacking off that imperial mane was more important than the premise for such doings!

On the face of it, I was pulled to the surface. The superficial meaning behind the cutting could not have been more plain. The shearing of us apart. A tangible thing, a reminder. A souvenir. A memento. In turn it became a symbol of _my_ indiscretion. The place that I had always thought of as home, Bella's striking hair; she had besmirched just as surely as she had annihilated the house of our love.

And my eyes swam with tears over this impasse. Everything was askew.

I picked futilely at the feeble strands sticking to the soles of my feet.

And a small bit of my soul flew back to me. Giant drops of liquid welled up, pooled amongst the softened, saddened moss of my eyes. But they would not fall.

With anticipation, Bella waited. Holding her breath. Holding her tongue. Whether she expected me to rage against her, fold her into me, or abscond brutally, I could not tell. And her obsequiousness pissed me off!

_Why had she done it?_

I needed to punish her!

Profanities and curses rolled of my tongue, such words as I'd never thought to utter!

"Fucking Jake! How could you!"

I tore the glasses from their perch on the bridge of her slim nose, crushed the fragile frames in the palm of my hand and sent them flying across the room where they shattered in the corner.

Tearing the t-shirt asunder, _my shirt_, I ripped it from her shoulders. Shaking hands grasped the waist of the boxers she wore, _my shorts_, and slid them hastily to the floor. All the while Bella stood still, quaking but not making a single sound.

Not a scrap of underwear or brassiere beneath. Bare. Barren. And I could clearly see the warpath Jake had soldiered sadistically upon her body. That body I had only ever honored.

Grating, scratching, scathing, scraping, scalding!

I licked up the full line of her neck before nipping hard at the bone of her jaw. My fingers, sick, sardonic fingers, pulled at her breasts in tandem before twisting hard at her nipples. And Bella moaned. She fucking moaned! She was enjoying the rough treatment of my hands, the criminality of my teeth.

"Did _he_ do that to you?" Harsh. Her head whipped from side to side…_no_.

"Did s_he_ make you feel like this?" Bella's encroaching grasp made its way roughly down my chest to my abdomen that she scored with her bitten-to-the-quick grotty fingernails embedded with dirt as if she'd just come in from the garden. Fingers trailed almost gently through my treasure trove to my dick that she fisted hard. So hard that it hurt, in that pleasurably excruciating way, and I'd never allow anyone else do that to me! Blood pounded into my erection so fast that I was dizzied. I'd never been so tenaciously touched. It made me want to cum on the spot; Bella made my cock throb with unheard-of force!

Riposte. Parry. Thrust. _No, she did not make me feel like this. _

Blasting each other. Taking a dynamite stick to the bodies that housed the souls we'd already murdered. _That she had murdered!_

Inflaming, igniting, and imploding.

We battled each other, each seeking the upper hand. I was just as needful and nasty as her. Reviling, not revering each other. Disgust and wounding and injury. Lust and sex and provocation. Despair and disregard while we gave into our most sordid senses. Debasing the bodies we'd always worshipped.

Fallow, formerly hallowed ground.

Detachment seeking reattachment.

Usually she played up and down my piece like it was a harmonica. She knew just how to tease with her suck and blow. I loved sensual, musical Bella. This was _not_ musical Bella. Grabbing my ass she pulled me fully into her mouth until I beat against the back of her throat, and further. I wondered what tricks she'd deployed with that mongrel.

I was harder than I'd ever been before. My cock secluded in the most constricted of all caverns, and she hummed all over me, fueling the swill of cum that was almost toppling out, vibrating against the most sensitive and only unbroken bit of my body.

I hated her for it all.

Even while my hips jerked into her, while my pubes rasped her nose; even as drops of semen sped down her elongated throat and my own neck cranked back, hands held tight to her shortened hair and every single debased muscle in my body climbed tighter and tighter, the idea of Jake slavering and slobbering, his muck all over Bella's body, continued to fucking kill me from the inside out! Imagining him baying over her beautiful, weeping, soaking, seeping, sexy, climaxing being! Jake's muzzle nuzzling. Distemper, rabid…I succumbed to my baser urges.

Slaking need. The howl built from the interior of my chest and climbed forcibly out of my mouth, my back nearly breaking in half and my pelvis plastered to her face as Bella's own mouth swallowed every single bit of jism that belted out of me.

**Bella**

Licking the last little teasers of Edward's essence from my face, I found my feet. My knees were dented. New battle scars would form to comingle with the old. Those from just yesterday. The canine-like tattoo**s** that had sent Edward into his wild frenzy.

I understood why.

I'd breached the ironclad vault of our love. Giving him head, feeling him feeding himself down my throat was no sacrifice.

Guilt was working its way into me. I could not separate the sin I'd committed from the Hail Mary of Edward's confession. Blowing him was hardly divine retribution.

_Was that the best I could do in way of an apology?_

I sucked. Figuratively too.

Night leeched the world of color. Latent darkness closed in around us. Time was immaterial. The only light was from the moon's arching journey across the inky dome, the stars erased. Through the half-open vertical blinds on the French doors that lead to our balcony, the platform that overlooked Jake's house, the celestial luminosity raked in, spilling fuzzy-edged bars onto the walls; a prison, a jail cell onto my body, dressed in slim columns of shadow and reflection, a convict's uniform. So apt was this dimly illuminated vignette.

With the moonlight strafing in, I watched Edward catch his breath. His release had been superlative and furious!

Raffish.

A ruffian.

Someone I almost couldn't identify.

Gathering super-human effort, searching for something I did not yet foresee, Edward seemed torn between two impulses; to cause further pain and to ease the pain. His expression, once regained from pure ecstasy, turned into a frown-scowl-furrow of fright twinned with forlornness.

To console and ease the anguish, or to further mutilate.

_Mine, his, ours_. Belonging and possession, seething sting and opened flesh that seeped with festering puss, and equally decomposing hunger and lust.

The slightest frisson of fear raised my body temperature and raced alongside ancient primal need to mate and repossess.

Edward was hunting me.

If Jacob was a wolf, then Edward was a mountain lion; sleek and deadly in his way. Steel, iron, marble granite, cold. Not hot, not nasty, not despicable, not perfidious, but made new to me in his fervor, his cold white fire…the bottomless depths of his viridian green eyes became coal-black and ignited and I was made to understand that _my_ body was _his_ territory.

Edward loped toward me, drew me to him and bit me with Zoom-white teeth—teeth that had known another's flesh--upon the skin of my neck; a neck that had met the tongue of another man. Slandering me. Every stroke was infiltrated by the imagery of some other man, some other woman consummating the very same act. We worked upon each other that much more demandingly, striving to beat back and repel the insistent, persistent keepsakes. Determined and consumed.

Needing to respell. Seeking respite. To retain, rediscover.

Staking his claim, stalking me, _recouping his_ _territory, _Edward was unleashed!

Yanking, shoving, and hauling.

Kissing, necking, groping!

And it was all hell-bent and twisted and unfathomable and us.

_But this was not us._

"Did you get it out of your system," Edward sneered, tensed like a wild cat, a mountain lion that I'd never reckoned before, his gentle fingers were anything but as they slanted up into me, gathering wetness along the way.

"Edward, that's not nice," my body fringed under his hot savage touch, my mind wept beneath the need to expunge every dastardly fantasy he had compiled of me and Jake, the remorse was killing me, but still I tsked him. Titillated. Tortured.

"Do please forgive me. Isn't that why you went across the road? Wasn't I too nice? Tell me, Bella, _is_ the grass greener?" He scorned.

Nothing could be more green, more beautifully lush and meadow-like than Edward's irises when he loved me. Made love to me. _This_ was not making love. This was staking claim! I was his, he was mine, and we were wrathfully staging a war upon each other's seditious flesh!

Sore and spiteful, grazing and biting, belting and pelting.

Threshing and thrashing.

Sanguine.

The moment of impact. One wide hand encircling my slim wrist and leashing it high up on the slim, carved, wooden column of our bedpost so that I was stretched tall on my tiptoes and the crest of my head still only met Edward's chin, my bare breasts extended, nipples high pinnacles raking his torso and aching. This collision was concentrated! Severe. With his other hand, Edward manacled my free forearm lower, behind my ass against the post, and his fine cock strove against my proffered tummy, my neck bowed backwards, my clipped locks snarling against the ornamental curvature of the spindles, my lips gasping and gaping before licking and sucking and biting up Edward's bared throat as he shoved against me. Every single muscle from mighty neck, high cheeks, mountainous arms, valleyed stomach, and wrought thighs clenched in a masterpiece of the barely-there control he was at least attempting to exert.

Desire volleyed through every single synapse that lined the subcutaneous articles of tissue. Fusing me to him.

The knobs of wood cut into my bottom, separating and clefting. Bruising. More to add to my growing list. Edward's head dropped down and pulled first one and then the other of my brightened, hardened, straining nubbins into his mouth, to lick once before attacking pitilessly with his teeth. Hopelessness and gratification battled with one another and there seemed to be no bridge across the chasm. To hurt, maim, retrieve, and love.

Desensitized and never more aroused!

This was no prelude. The percussive racket was as vivid as a cacophonous avant-garde caterwauling!

Then, less of a pirouette, more of a jerk, he turned me around. Back to front. My tits mashed against that knobbly bedpost that was embedded in my cleavage, fashioning a line to my navel and meeting the schism of my sex, pushing lips apart and awfully, atrociously, dreadfully agreeably chafed against my engorged clit. I wanted to weep and sob and fight! I let loose an almighty cry of malicious delight. Edward's groan accompanied his knee that lifted behind my own, raising my thigh onto the end of the imported goosedown mattress, widening my stance, splaying me, further exposing me in my abject need.

Against that pillar, the spinets and bulbs of aged, polished oak against my front, Edward's unyielding musculature against my back. Rasping, rough, tough, he spread me wider than I though possible and entered me. Not unkindly. Gently. Sensually. Inch by bloody gorgeous inch. Until he was deep-seated and all the sound was sucked out of our room in a vacuum. Holding breath. It was simply a precursor for the doom to come. When he pulled out, fast, I nearly swooned. My forehead met the mast of our bed and racy images of Edward's long girth filled my mind just as he plunged heatedly into me again! Sublimations, the forerunners of unending orgasms ricocheted throughout me, ratcheted me up another notch and my squeal of release earned me another almighty preposterous heave!

_You are MINE!_ He didn't have to say it for I could feel it.

At least he was not disowning me.

That was my only coherent thought.

The rest was my brain forcing my mouth to open and close, like a guppy. Reminding my lungs to pull in air. Against the force of Edward pillaging my wet, wet pussy. Groaning and grunting and gnashing behind me as he hefted me up yet further until he was grappling with the support of our bed, hurtling into me, squashing me most deliciously, rapaciously, triumphantly! And that fucking bedpost beating against my swollen clit had me spilling from the get-go.

And it was not just. Not trite. Not quite right.

I still needed to own this. And that one emission, that which I needed to say, to show, to do, still lay in waiting. Through it all, this egregious eroticism, I understood that I could not simply glide through this delinquency with an act of omission. It could not be purely tactile, tacit, unspoken. I needed to find my voice through the moans, the littering sighs and gasps, and I _needed_ to find the words to stop this gushing outflowing of our love.

Two words. Forming a tourniquet. Staunching the blood loss.

**Edward**

The rendition we played out was unlike anything before. Archaic and primitive and like lunatics!

Pounding into her, I reached above Bella, seizing the bedpost in a deathgrip while my cock battered in and out of her, over and over, wet, slippery, tight hole holding me and releasing me, long, hard, fast thrusts that originated in the balls of my feet, up through my calves and thighs and straight out my groin, crouching and then lunging up into her. Gripping the bedpost until my knuckles turned to bone lest my hands forgot and took hold of her neck again.

But, as if of their own accord, those killing, healing hands slackened. Wanting contact. They had to reach higher up than before to snatch the severed-off ends of Bella's hair, but I managed, and I yanked her neck back so that it arched like that of a swan in the luster of the dull gloom. The most vulnerable, most delicious, most deviant piece of her body, the ghostly singular light elucidated fragments and shards of Jacob's lip-sucks placed there.

Replacing his stamp with my own embossing, I worked up and down her nape while the air vibrated with our choppy breathing and our bodies collided timelessly.

With my lips on her neck, Bella found her own tongue. Turned her head to the side. Sideways eyes hot and half-mast and long lashes not hiding the passion and only-love. Shining love. And apology. The expression therein stilled me. And finally, _finally_. Fully. Not quietly, but stridently and forthrightly I heard her, heard Bella say, "I'm sorry. _I am so sorry, Edward_."

And those words, that admission, no longer an admonishment, turned me from stone to man again. Triggered me back to the man that loved Bella. Who would never hurt her. Who still needed to adulate her, at least begin by respecting her. I would never deify her again.

Vivacious beauty was found.

Veracity came alive.

No longer a void, no longer avoiding.

I just wanted to love her.

I would start there.

I pivoted Bella, gracefully, elegantly, into me. Brought her flayed body off of the rod, turned her to me, and met her earthen eyes that rocketed me as ever into the stratosphere, into the orbit that we might, _hopefully_, inhabit together once again.

Silken and velvety and trying to smooth over, sand out the rough spots that we'd just inflicted in our outrageous rage. Self-destruction radiated into sacrifice and our equal blame furloughed into a balm.

Erasing.

Expelling.

Extolling.

But real. No longer idealized.

And the Luna Moth called to me.

**Bella**

Up and down the back of my neck, Edward licked. I'd heard his intake of breath at the sight of what I imagined to be Jake's impressions there. I felt the shake of his head editing the vision. In lieu of loathing, somehow he found ardor.

Looking over my shoulder I saw his gorgeous face battling with the raging beast within. And still fucking loving me! My lollygagging tongue retreated to fashion the words that needed to be heard.

"I'm sorry. _I am so sorry, Edward._"

His eyes unclouded and I yet feared that he was going to belt me. Instead, he pelted me with kisses, soft. Showering. Rainstorm. Shivering up and down my body. Sensuously licking and owning even the marks of Jake. It was in contrast to the thunderous rampaging we both had lived through, lightning striking our bodies and the bellowing crash of thunder bolts hungering through us.

Ghastly grasping glances turned to gentleness. Revenge evolved. Love found its footing. Haltingly, hesitatingly. Still hard. Still hurt. Still suspicious. But possibly victorious.

Lunges turned to loving touches.

A fledgling thing, fluttering with fragile wings just unfolding. Not yet beating, but no longer beating each other.

Edward wrapped his arms, the lengthened ligaments of which had always been my haven, around me. Towed me back onto him, away from the bedpost I'd been propelled against. Shushed with fingertips and the most melodious of touches to my sore nipples, soothingly, and between my legs, mellifluously sweeping into the folds….and whiled away the time up the sighing side of my neck with trembling open lips that fumed warm breath over my shivering skin. Skin that never thought to feel such adoration again! And in my ear, quietly, in supplication, "_Bella, my love, I will always be yours."_

His hands folding against me, limbs tightening around me. And it was a sensual daze of a haze. This wrapping back up into the bedclothes of Edward's body. Erotic and entirely _everything! _His torso against my back, his cock striving into the cleft of my ass, and his ballooning tip touching the base of my spine. His balls brushing over me. His fingers gliding with such utter restfulness, as if coming home, and excitation, as if he'd never known this skin. Molding me anew, yet unearthing the old. The thing we had been. Together.

"_Ooooh_. Edward..."

Spinning me sweetly around, Edward's talented hands lingered along my back. Stroking every surface, causing resurgence. I followed suit to caress all of him! Chest, so delineated with muscle, shoulders so glistening, down to his tight, hard, drum of a tum, over his lean hips onto his hard ass, around his toned thighs that bristled with hair and bridled to my touch. Inner thighs, tensing, my palms flattened and slowly, _achingly slowly_, converged to his velvety smooth balls that I handled with care, and finally to his stunning dick that was so engorged I needed both hands to enclose him. Loving the feel of him within my grasp, we both watched silently as I pulled up and pushed down with the kindest kindling of motions. Assiduously, showing absolute care with the way I covered his body.

Drawing back, Edward kneeled before me to suckle my tattoo, to outline its wings with his tongue, to purse his firm lips to the centerpiece.

His hand curved over the bowl of my belly with an intent I did not understand, lightly cupping me.

Not restless.

One.

The sliver hint of calm. The eye of the storm.

All had been ragged before. Now it was settled. Sensual. Sweet. Sexy. Silent and sibilant and slithering. The way we moved over each other. Like never before! Kisses were neither soft nor deep enough. Flickering fingers were not featherish, feverish, and finally not tough enough. Licks were not liquid enough and nibbles upon pliant skin were no longer retaliation, only a revelation. An indelible dye of a touch meant to define the permanence of _us_.

Supplanting newly rooted devastation.

And it was love letting loose. I pushed both hands into his mad, tousled hair, kneading his scalp. Massaging, calming, gentling, and exciting lust. But not fighting. No aversion.

This new impetus was from our barely retrieved hearts beating in sync.

And hopeful.

Docile and wary.

Wondering and wistful.

Edward rose to his feet, lifted me up and lowered me to the bed. He lingered above me. Plied my thighs open. Considerately and delicately.

Advancing, but questioning with his eyes.

With humility I smiled, "Yes, Edward…_yes_."

My skin, my body, my spirit was perfectly pliable, I knew this and still this was new. One. The same. Equals. When he entered me, holding himself aloft and his cock brushing several heart racing times over my folds, not to tease but to test, the combination of our two beings made one singular whole! Into me, inch by solid inch, taking it, taking me, slowly. As if he were tuning and tightening the stings of a violin to attain just the right pitch. Pitch perfect. Feverishly peaceful, I waited and willed myself to remain immobile, watching the way his goddamn glorious body winched into me.

The last bit of his whole length and breadth filled me to bursting! Braced back on my elbows, my head dropped back so even the chop-shop of my cropped hair met the duvet beneath. Edward's balls draped onto the dripping lower realm of me and his shaft, so thick and so rigid, pulsed inside of me.

We moaned in unison.

He swirled in and swept out. All of him out, all of him in. And both of us inhaled misty air and exhaled groans each and every time.

We kept time.

The metronome swung. Tick Tock. Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

And Edward's cock was heavenly. Bearing himself up on his arms he watched every reaction of my body with eyes that were as dark as a Pacific Northwest forest during a rainstorm, and when he could not contain the shaking of his biceps he lowered his chest to my breasts so that our nipples tingled against each other, our pubic hair tangled into each others, and his arms sunk and slid under me, trapping me close. Closer than the humid air that slicked sweat over us.

The metronome slapped faster. Ticktock, ticktock, ticktock! The unhurried became the harried. Harder, _grunt_, quicker, _Ung!_, deeper, _Oh oh oh!_

Until time ceased to exist. And started afresh with the cosmic blast of a black hole rupturing the entire universe!

"_Edward!"_

"_Bella!"_

Drizzling down an epiphany.

**Edward**

I accepted Bella. I took her admission of guilt to heart. Our mutual act of contrition was…a soulfully beautiful thing to behold.

Two words. One step. Heading towards healing.

Crawling into me, pressing wholly against me, Bella's heart mimicked mine with the speeding that decelerated in tune with the spreading, rosy hue of the sunrise entering our room, dribbling across the canvas of our rumpled bed on which laid two broken but mending people. Husband and wife. Taking the good and the bad. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part.

Senses returned. But oh so slowly. Sensuality still succored us. Suctioned us together.

With undying gratitude she whispered against my lips, her lids closing over melted eyes, "Thank you. I'm sorry." One tear from each shuttered orb tracked down the apples of both of her cheeks. Putting my fingers in their path I watched in fascination as the droplets erupted against my skin. Placing my fingers to my lips, I tasted the saltiness. Knew Bella's sadness. Squeezing her waist, finding her fingertips, gliding over them and into their valleys and grasping her hands tight, I smoothed away somberness and with my lips to her mouth I sighed, "I know my love, I know. I'm sorry. _I love you._"

Barren souls had been laid bare.

We were not repaired, not in the least. But I hoped that I'd shown Bella that she was mine just as surely as I was hers. And that only together were weglorious, and complete.

Still us, but a changeling thing. Different and misshapen.

And though I dreaded hashing it all up again, this thing that was us would never be revamped unless we were honest, I still needed to know. With Bella's hands in mine, _tight_, with my heart in her hands, _forever_, I compelled her to look at me and asked the hardest question of all, "Why?"

* * *

**A/N:**

**Righteo, this puppy ain't over, not by a longshot (I would say two more chapters to go and look to next week for at least one of them), but I feel compelled to try to explain the reasoning behind it because there have been a few questions. But feel free to skip this if you are totally clued in!**

**What I really wanted to portray with this snapshot of a story was the instance of fallibility. What could cause one to behave abominably even in the face and within the embrace of utterly true infinite love. And if that should happen, what would the consequences be? Of humanness. That no one is perfect, most certainly not Bella or Edward, neither here nor in canon (at least that is my interpretation). And Jacob always played a role in that. Everyone is capable of the most heinous misdeeds. Vampires, humans, wolves… in our emotions and actions we are all made mortal and privy to personal tragedy of our own making.**

**In this chapter alone, my aim was to realize the conflict between Edward and Bella's need to reclaim each other as well as their desire to destroy each other over their mutual abuse of that most sacred thing, their marriage. **

**And finally, y'all don't have to get it. This absolutely will not ring true for everybody. That's cool. I understand that.**

**Yo, enough of that! I adore every single review (well, you know what I mean) but really want to thank BellaStjerne f****or her magnificently thought provoking review of Take a Bow because she made me contemplate Bella's thought process in a new light.**

**And thanks to jeesiechreesie, she of Atlas Shrugged whose formidable portrayal of Bella has breathed new stronger life into my own Bella. You should read it because it is amazing, and poetic, and beautiful. **

**See my profile for the song itself, **_**Empty Cans**_**, by The Streets. On The Streets, you really have to listen to the entirety of **_**A Grand Don't Come for Free**_** as it is a story in and of itself. But if you want to dabble, try out the song **_**Dry Your Eyes.**_

**_UPDATE: Some fucking cool chicks have set up a thread for this story (SRSLY!) on the TwilightedDOTnet forums. We're running amuck in the AU section...come and play!_**


	6. Marked

**Marked**

**A/N: Here's a little sweet sexy interlude, a tension breaker, a growing up of Jake and proof that he is becoming a man of substance, no more an asshole than is my Bella or my Edward. More A/N at the end.**

**Ta-cheers-TA to vanessarae; the fact that she hated this at the beginning because of the premise and then let me turn her ideas inside out pretty much beggars belief. Oh yeah, and she's an awesome beta too!**

**Disclaimer: Nay I say, I own nothing of Twilight. **

* * *

**JPOV**

I was expecting a clash of the titans. But who knew he had it in him? The gentlemanly doctor across the road going all street fighter on me!

Two weeks. Two weeks since I'd had my fucking nose busted so hard I'd had to go to the ER for a splinting; that shit was not going to heal itself.

I was a marked man.

Cocky and swaggering, I'd staggered, briefly, beneath the force of Edward's blow. Stumbled back against the door.

I didn't even have a chance to get my own jabs in -- _not that I would have; the dude was fucked up enough as it was!_ -- before Edward stormed away across the street, clutching what I hoped was a crushed fist to his chest, back to his demolished kingdom.

The dominion I'd had a mighty hand in destroying.

My eye, my mouth, my nose…_punch, punch, punch_!

Striking me with three relentless quick-snap blows that were enough to make a small dent in my super-sized ego. They left a dint alongside his feral warning to _stay the fuck away from his woman! _

I worked outside a bit less.

I never gawped at Bella, not even when she appeared with her hair about six inches shorter.

I avoided Edward's fists like fire runs from water.

Me and my fuckin' one-eyed snake had gotten me into this mess!

Four days after I so thoroughly fucked his thrashing wife, three days after he'd disconnected my nasal passages from the cartilage that formed my nose, I unexpectedly felt a cold presence at my back as I was getting helmeted up and ready to motor.

Edward. Prideful and no less stupid, I didn't cringe.

Ever the better man I knew he was compared to the juvenile boy that still claimed hold of me, he apologized, shook my hand, and then told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever so much as thought about Bella _in that way_ again, he would know. And there would be _ramifications._ His word, not mine.

Translation: _I might as well sign my own fucking death certificate_.

And he was all dark chuckles and ESP'ing as I worked my way through his words to the inevitable outcome of my demise.

Creepy-ass walking thesaurus!

I knew Edward was serious as a fucking heart attack. As in, I had a pretty fucking frightening feeling that the bastard could read my goddamn mind! He even shot a grim smile in my direction as those very thoughts filled my head, as if he had reached in to my musings and drew them out.

So I ate a small sliver of humble pie. I'd had better--_pie_ that is. I tried on self-deprecation for size and found it not much to my liking.

With my tail tucked between my legs, _just slightly_, shamefaced, _just a bit_, I met up with my boys Quil and Embry when my messed up face finally looked less Frankenstein-ish. Shrugging off their questions, I didn't tell them of the Edward-cyclone that had caused my mangled, mottled, yellowing cuts. I kept mum on blowing my wad with hot Bella, the WILF across the road. I did not want to fist-bump or high-five them over this particular conquest!

It had been a mistake, but even now I wasn't sure I wouldn't do exactly the same thing again, back then. Sure, sure, hindsight was 20/20 and all that shit, but _man_ could she fuck! And I'd hankered after her long enough not to look a gift pony in her very gifted mouth.

Others who had sucked me off….acted more like they were chomping and choking on a corn dog! Not Bella though. She had attacked my tackle all breath and whistle and high-pitched licking.

And now my fucking foolish mouth hurt with every smile because of Edward's bashing fists. Sure as fuck, I would never look her way, _like that_, again!

Shit! That shiner Edward had lashed into me, his knuckles like small blocks of marble, fucking stung! Couldn't blame him though, what the hell was I thinking? That I could have Bella without repercussions? It did not matter that _she_ had come to _me,_ all doe-eyes slanting with a come-fucking-hither look.

And here I was, thinking about Bella, praying Edward was not actually able to read my mind. Stupidly trying to figure out why she had let me mess with her. But I continued because I had nothing else. Edward idealized her to the point of canonization, or martyrdom. I'd observed enough to suss out the design of their web-like dreamcatcher. Her only path in light of such adulation, in retaliation to Edward's demi-god's perch on Mount Olympus, was to become a fallen angel. Tarnishing the halo while shedding great swathes of dazzling white plumage on her descent.

_Yeah_, I know, deep thoughts and Jake Black, hand-in-hand? Who knew?

_I knew. _I just never let on.

So, where did that place me in Bella's game plan? She had just wanted to go hog-wild with someone on par with her. And that she thought of us as equals blew my fucking mind! Someone to touch her; not in revelation, but in reality.

Hell, if Bella had felt she needed to outsource to get some kind of sexual gratification, who I was to say no?

It was a dog-eat-dog world, what else could I say?

I didn't really feel any regret.

But for some reason I was sad.

Not that I wanted Bella to be mine. I didn't. I'd gotten what I wanted. I was all good with _that_.

But now, thrown into sharp relief, I understood that I was waiting for something just beyond my reach.

No, it sure as hell was not Miss Bella. One roll in the hay, one release of the teepee that my big warrior made of my shorts at the sight of her was enough to make me understand that.

She was Edward's. And even while I surreptitiously watched them in the aftermath of their total misery struggling to put their pieces back together…they had something, a steely thread, _ten million_ steely threads that wrapped all around them even more strongly than before.

_I wanted that thing. _I was_…_fuck_, I was lonely!_

Where was _my_ one true mate?

**{}{}{}{}**

Months passed.

The triangle that was shaped of my single man's house, with Bella and Edward's refurbished sanctuary forming the base, settled into an uneasy courtesy. We waved but did not talk. I was pretty fucking sure all of our other snoopy, nosy whispering-behind-lace-curtains neighbors talked, _a lot_. Eh, at least they had a topic of conversation to enliven their bridge games, tee times, and tea parties.

I no longer gave a fuck, the past was the past. And I gave more of a fuck than I let on.

_I wanted that thing._

I went to work at the auto-body shop, schlepped it around and still fucked around because a man has needs, but I was missing something. There were even a couple ménage-a-twats, but they left me feeling…_less._ And suddenly I wanted to feel _more_.

I went to the gym, played b-ball with my boys, surfed whenever there was a decent swell in sight; put all thoughts of sex with Bella from my mind. I laughed at jokes and played my part. I was good at that.

I rode my bike, howled with the freedom, and flying fast down the highway was the only time my mind was on auto-pilot.

Every goddamn time I dismounted, kicked the stand into place, leaned my baby over to rest, took off my helmet and shook my hair loose, grasping the ends and gripping them hard, I was still just passing the time.

Always looking, searching the crowds. Narrowing my eyes to inspect the features of every single woman with potential who crossed my path. And there was not one spark. Not a single moment of recognition.

Faceless women made it to my bed, I banged countless, nameless chicks. I gave up hope, and became an animal.

Withdrawing more, feeling less, wondering, and always waiting but no longer searching.

**{}{}{}{}**

Work, play, working out, working on my toys…endless repeat. Ad nauseam. Etc. Blah fucking blah, blah, blah. Not one ounce of me was any longer "la-de-da".

Hours, days, weeks, months, several months, six months. Six fucking unending months!

And celibacy…fucking not fucking a damn thing just like a monk! Going all chaste and untouched and not touching and not even caring--_almost_.

And then, finally. _Finally!_ Something else.

The very instant I saw _her_, all thoughts of any other woman disappeared. My eyes, my heart, my soul, my fucking arms and fingers and legs and chest wanted to wrap right around her! Hopeful! Alive! New-born! Those impossibly strong, platinum spinets that webbed around Bella and Edward…_those_ yarns were nothing compared to the indestructible, million-fold fine wires that stopped the earth on its axis so that this woman I'd never seen before and myself could collide in a moment that took a page out of time. Creating a thick rind, a shield, an atmosphere, in impermeable force field between us. Impenetrable.

_Who the hell is that? _

She rolled up to Dick's Fix It (or 'Fuck It' as we liked to call it) in the passenger seat of the tow truck, literally peeling the scummy leer of the honky-white, sweaty ass-crack showcasing driver from her skin, skin that was utter perfection beneath her rubbing hands, trying to rid herself of the skank's stare, and probably suffocating from the putrid stink of his crotch-rot. Figured it had to be beady pig-eyed Mike fuckin' Newton's day on! Even her nose wrinkling in distaste for him hit me as cute. _Cute?_

My inner beast awoke. I growled at the grungy look the Mutant was sliming all over her.

And her broken-down, half-rusted, V-dub Rabbit was clamped to the magnetic horseshoe on the back.

A rattle-trap. _I could fix that right up for her_, free of charge.

One look and I knew I'd do so much more than that _for her_. Bring it on! I'd walk over hot coals, sleep on a bed of nails, and swallow fire…_anything_.

I'd never breathed before this moment.

My inner Quileute stirred. I could see the cords from my spirit realm that echoed the chords of my tensed, wanting-to-race-to-her neck, fly from me to her. And when those tensile threads of awareness, of my keenness, flailed across her being, she looked me in the eye.

_I was done waiting for something._

Stalking to the cab, I pulled on the groaning handle, offered my hand, swallowed her own in my clasp, hauled her down, and glowered at the scurvy-festering perv.

A grateful smile lifted the lush corners of her heart-shaped crimson lips.

As if I'd just saved her from a fate worse than death, when all I'd done was rescued her from some scumbag of a tow truck driver.

Shyness took hold, _what the hell!_ I shuffled my feet and toed the gravel, created circles in the dirt with my scuffy Adidas, my fully-alive glance following the movement. I was nearly shitting myself in fear I would mess up this moment, the moment that hit me like napalm.

Earth and sky and outer space. Gone. All the people around us, ghosts. Bella and Edward and my stupidity, disintegrated.

Entering the range of my downcast eyes, I watched her hand advance, opened, to me. "Thank you," she said in a voice that was clarified honey. I blushed, _yeah fuckin' Jake Black blushed because of a voice!,_ and lifted my eyes to be impaled in her dancing amused stare.

All sweaty palms and balking like an untamed Mustang, scared and full of wonder at how immediately I'd been reigned in and harnessed, I met her hand and concentrated on the smallness of it inside my own. Soft and tiny, but strong and powerful. And just like that, a spark raced through me and _I was a marked man_.

Dick, very appropriate name for the douchewad I worked for, called her over with a whiny, "Miss?"

Releasing her fingers, I did not relinquish her from my sights. Curvy and petite, a perfect figure eight that begged for my hands to wrap around her waist. Her hair was like the deep glow of embers when the fire burns too hotly and all that is left is the ignition of flame on charcoal. Skin like bleached whale bone, fine and creamy and smooth. She was all kinds of un-perfect, with her bow-lips that finalized the asymmetry of her heart-shaped face that was not quite completely tuned with her rounded ass, begging to be held in my dirty, oil-creased palms. Innocent and a seductress. All small but with inner force illuminating her.

I was broken out of my guilty lust-haze by a lilting touch upon my forearm. My skin rushed at the feel. "I just wanted to say thanks again, Jake," and she fucking winked at me as she said my name! I almost squealed like a Christly cheerleader. My coveralls definitely became tighter. My knees were knocking. I could not believe my reaction to her!

My Adam's apple bobbed twice before I could make a coherent noise other than a squeak, "Sure, sure. No problem." Taking heart, finding my balls that were smashed hard within the grease-stained dark blue _Dick's Fix It_ overalls, I leaned far down to whisper, "I don't know how much Dickhead quoted you but I could do you up for free." _Gah, do you up? What the hell man? Do up your car…assfuckinghole!_ And I fucking flushed again beneath the stormy darkness of my skin.

_Fuck._

Not in the least insulted, she replied, "That's very generous, Jake! I would really appreciate it, but surely I'd have to do something in return." Those words coupled with another wink and lifting of one arching eyebrow almost had me cumming on the spot!

_Fuck me!_

"My pleasure," the sound was crackly and hoarse and fucking said everything I was feeling. Before I could halt the verbal diarrhea, I kept going, in that same I'm-just-a-horny-boy voice, far too high-pitched a noise, _and_ fucking stuttering to boot, "Uh, erm, yeah. Um, no problem. Eh, _fuck_, sorry! I mean, _shit_, shit!" I shook my head, inadvertently whipping the poor woman with my ponytail, feeling all the more absurd and unsure and _damn_ nothing more than a teenager! She must have been about twenty-five, nearly my age. Here I was, acting like a complete fuckwad, probably blowing my chances with my Tourette's outburst, blowing all of my chances at getting blown…Oh. The. Fuck. No. _Don't even go there, Jake!_

Interrupting my silent flogging, a satisfied grin on her mouth, she introduced herself, "My name's Renesmee by the way. Bit of a weird name, so don't even ask!" She rolled her eyes and continued, "But my friends call me May."

And again, following up with the wink and grin so that my dick kinked up another notch and I had to hold the clipboard with her car's details in front of my crotch. Embarrassed and fucking delighted and just _wowi!_

_Bow wow._

Finally.

We made a date, _we made a date_, for her to join me at my house so I could start work on the Rabbit. It wasn't really a date. I kept telling myself that as I showered, shaved, sniffed my pits, and handled my junk to ensure it was still in working order--because the way I'd been acting around May at Dick's kinda made me wonder if I was becoming a nancy!

Two or three thoughts of May later and I was about to burst.

_Yup, it's all good._

Not that I had any plans for her. Or for having sex with her. Hell yes I had wanted her immediately but oddly, newly, interestingly, I just really wanted to talk to her. To be in her presence.

I brought her car to my house. She joined me nightly after her classes let out; she was a grad student in art history and hoped to make her name as a college professor one day. Art history, bah! I knew zilch about it but for the earthy workings of my people, and I could certainly school her in the ways of the Native American totem pole! But I wouldn't go there. Couldn't go there with May. She was so honest and forthright and funny! Earnestly learning the names for all of my tools, never once touching my tool but all fucking innuendo so that I was hard as all fuck by the time she left and had no other choice but to take matters into my own hands! She was so fucking cute! And smart. And absolutely _everything_.

Pretty. Yeah, May was pretty. Perfect in her imperfection, full bitten pink lips kind of lopsided, weird bronze eyes a bit too large, her cheeks wore apples of spring color, high breasts and convex hips and small waist were all in proportion and her ass was the stuff that wet dreams were made of. And I was getting all fucking poetic about a chick.

Bonus, she liked to throw hoops. We ended our nightly sessions with a quick game of HORSE. Me panting, her gasping, and it was all so right that my mind almost didn't wander to the other extracurricular activities that would have us panting and gasping and groaning and moaning and, _fuck_, sweating! It was _almost_ like she was my best mate. But she was all woman.

May had me second guessing. Teasing and leaning over and bending and beaming but not quite letting on…was this just my thanks? Her show of appreciation?

I was pretty fucking solid that she wasn't disingenuous but I found it impossible to read her.

Did she even find me attractive?

_Hello, girlfriend! Do not even go there! What are you? A fourteen-year-old girl passing notes in class? Ask May on a date, dickhead. _

I felt like Oprah and Doctor Phil were fighting inside my brain! Definitely not a good sign. I was more used to Springer and Povich.

A date?

Fuck me.

I had no clue how to do this.

Jake did not date.

_Did he?_

Jake needed to stop thinking of himself in the third person. Too much Facebook time.

Apparently Jake did dates now.

And Jake really needed to cut the royal-we shit out!

The first time we held hands was, not to go all profound and all, but it was a revelation!

Braiding her slim fingers through mine, May's small touch felt like home.

Weeks passed in the same routine. Sometimes I saw less of May because of final exams, work study, her thesis. And everything she said to me was intriguing. I missed her like hell and wondered where all this was going. Going to dinner, catching a movie, checking out the local baseball team, sitting so close to her in the stadium--I still felt nervous as hell every time I put my preposterously huge arm over her shoulders. Inevitably she clasped my hand at her upper arm and caressed the skin between my knuckles.

Our first kiss was…soft. Sweet. The complete opposite of everything I'd ever known! Only after tender licking, aching, pressing, did we open our mouths to each other. And when tongue met tongue my eyes slammed shut and I was just _there_. Pulling her by the nape of her neck into my embrace. Hunger rid me of any other thought!

_Fuck man! Let up! _

Worried that I'd taken advantage, me…_worried_!, I released May's neck and her mouth, her smooth as silk, plush mouth, and rested my forehead against hers. Hot breath pounded between us.

Just the force of that kiss made me scared for what was to come. And because fear was not an emotion I wore well, I started swearing and apologizing and fuck me, was I emoting? Nah, surely the fuck not! "May, god May. I'm sorry! That was too much, too fast!" Who was I kidding, I fucked on a whim, and sucked pussy on a dime…this was anything but fast! We'd kept our hands to ourselves for three whole months! But I didn't want to rush into anything with May. She was too good, too pure. And now I knew how Edward felt about Bella. I was such a cocksucker to have fucked Bella. Suddenly I had new respect for Edward, how he managed not to kill me that night became an immediate mystery.

"Are you okay?"

My brow furrowed, my eyes sweeping her face. And what did I see? A grin. A jaunty, hot-as-hell grin and May licking her lips as if to savor the taste of me there! Shit. Correction: Holy. Fucking. Shit.

All honey husky and horny, "Jake, don't worry about me. I've been waiting for that. In fact, I was beginning to think you were batting for the other team! In all honesty, how many times can I wear ridiculously short shorts, revealing tanktops? I'm almost embarrassed to call myself a feminist! How many more times would I have had to bend over my car or whup your ass at basketball, skimming my breasts against your back as I parlayed your defense? Hell, are you a fucking monk or what?"

My harsh laugh cut through the tensed air. Shit, shit, and holy fucking shit! May was calling me out! Damn, damn, and fuck-a-doodle! _My_ noodle was immediately rigid.

"Eh, I'm no monk, May. I'm, uh, sorry," again with that fucking un-Jake sheepishness and squirming. "I've wanted you, _Jesus_ how I've wanted you! Are you kidding me? And all those touches and fucking everything, _sorry_, fuck!, sorry! You were trying to get me to make a play?"

Another lick of her lips, a dancing light in her bright bronze eyes, a simple nod of assent.

I ran my hand through my hair, "Damn almighty."

"The thing is," I continued, "and I'll tell it to you straight. I'm definitely no monk. I've kind of been around the block a bit," and I had to cough-bark-laugh that I'd even said that because it was so not funny anymore, "and…I dunno'? Um, _shit_, I really wanted to, _want to_, wait. With you."

_Damn, I really was going all chick!_

Her voice was the tiniest bit annoyed and huffy but also amused, "I hate to break it you, Jake, but we _have_ waited!" My lowered eyes laughed at her sandal-shod foot stamping with impatience.

"Yeah," I was smirking in spite of myself and still all nervy over this newness, "I really just want it to be special." _Please tell me I did not just whine!_

So fucking sexy, all rough and low-husky, May pushed a slim finger up the straining muscles of my neck until she reached my jaw which she tapped once to direct me upwards to her face, "Oh honey, I guarantee you it will be _special." _Complete with the wink, the grin, the wicked glimmer that flashed all dark gold in her strangely lit eyes!

And my zipper was about fit to burst and I needed to stop her right there, because there was more, and since I was already a sissy I might as well go all the goddamn way!

Tearing my pathetic lovelorn eyes from May's tempting promise, away from her wide-ass smile, all beauty and truth and un-masked, I was helpless to stop the soppy confession that rumbled forth, "The thing is, May," and here I paused, breathed deeply, gathered courage, ripped my hands over my head before hanging them helplessly at my sides, meeting her encouraging look once more, "I love you." I fucking cringed with those words, expecting a laugh or rebuke or anything wrong because I'd never said them before, I'd most definitely never thought them in this way!

The laugh that came out of her was not harsh or hard or jarring or angry or disdainful. It was light and lilting and relieved and…happy! "Fuck, Jake, you look like you've just confessed to murder rather than being in love!" Another peal of chiming giggles spilled out of her as she wrapped her arms right around my waist, bent her head into my chest and sneaked against me. Her warm, billowing breath made my t-shirt moist against my sternum, her nose rubbed and smelled deeply, her hair cascaded over my forearms that clenched her closer, "Say it again," she demanded and I felt the smile of her full lips forming against the cotton that barred my skin from her lips.

This time I relaxed, I put my mouth to her blossoming cheek; I whispered against her, "I love you, May."

Her smile grew so wide it stretched the fabric of my shirt, and my own was just as big.

_I was a marked man._

**{}{}{}{}**

She hadn't said it back. That alone could have killed me, but I respected May for it instead. Either she wasn't ready or she just wasn't there yet. Okay, yeah, it did injure my pride, of course it did!, but I'd much rather she said it because she felt it too, not in obligation.

I wasn't clingy or hovering but I showed my feelings for her in every way I could. I told May as often as possible without seeming like a complete fucking sap.

Physically, sexually, we moved forward. May wanted more. So fucking weird for me to be the one practicing discipline and man that shit was hard! Forget _My Morning Jacket_, I had My Morning Jackoff (and a nooner and a nighter, a triad of beating it daily so as not to go at May like a rabid dog!).

Mashed smashed succotash…finally it became just too much. She was never raunchy or nasty, but just so intrinsically sensual that every move and stroke and kiss and lick became pure torture, and in the end I figured that I could either die of a chronic case of blue balls or make love to the woman that I loved and who wanted this every bit as much as I did!

It all started when I was showing May to her reconstructed Rabbit, intent on snogging her, perhaps a quick cop of her incredible breasts, helping her into her seat, seeing her off, awaiting her nightly phone call when she inevitably proclaimed succulent racy thoughts that had me once again in a cold shower jerking off _again_.

Figuring that there was no way I'd get so carried away in my driveway that I'd throw her down on the front yard and take her like a greedy mutt, _would I?_, I always said goodbye to her outside; I'd never even invited her inside! That was the danger zone.

Tonight she took charge. All shiny eyes and precious lips, she held herself back from my kiss. Took a further step away so that she was pressed against the bonnet, placed her hands behind her, effectively throwing her tits into sharp relief, and stated, "You do realize you've never so much as asked me inside, right?" Her small teaser of a pout just about killed me when she looked off to the side, "A girl might start to think she's not attractive."

Oh no she did NOT! As fucking _if_. Well now there was no recourse was there?

Let Edward be the gentleman then. I was done with this game of hide and tease.

I wanted so much to throw May over my shoulder like a Neanderthal but instead clasped her hand in mine, hard, an echo of our first handholding but with impertinence and need sling-shotting through me.

We went through the front door, and trying not to slam it back into place, I closed it softly and turned into May.

And May turned _me_ so that her back was to the door.

We weren't even going to make it upstairs.

Her dainty hands sped up my arms and tore under the short sleeves of my shirt, hauling them up until she was pulling on my shoulders. Towing me down to her.

Lips tugging on mine, tongues touching and swirling and retreating. Small samples of breath. Sweat forming.

May released my shoulders and raced down to the hem of my shirt. I wanted to stop her. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted all of this first time with her over, and I wanted it to last for-fuckin-ever! I almost tore her hands from my 't', and _almost_ begged her to stop.

I was seven shades of bashful…why? I was ripped! Ridiculous. I had never so much as taken my shirt off in her presence! And what about my junk? Was I just some gross monstrosity? Not to be pigheaded, but I knew I was well endowed, something I'd always been proud of before, but now I was anxious about May's reaction! Where the hell were my balls of steel? They'd be shriveled figs right now but for the fact that May was looking at me, speechlessly, for once. One long finger, followed closely by her whole hand, made contact with the wolf tattoo. My breath hitched in my throat. Fingertips traced, "_Beautiful_," she sighed, distinctly soft and clear. And no one had ever said that to me before.

My stomach contracted. And I fidgeted uneasily, still trying to find my gonads.

Those tender, tactile touches worked their way up my abs, taking in the landscape like pioneers, mapping all of my geography, until both hands, ten fingers molded over my pecs. Air intake fucking stopped. I was asphyxiating beneath May's caress! She pulled those perfect fingertips inward until they all joined and clamped down on my nipples, smoothing over the sliver of whale bone and making way for her pointed tongue.

I head-banged the door so hard that the halogen light outside came on in its bright searching illumination. Dogs fucking barked, of course.

Impertinent, emboldened, May trailed one palm back down my stomach. _Oh shit!_ She reached my treasure trail and whorled one fingertip around, her lips sucking my nipples until they jutted full out. Before she dived down, but not in, _thank you god, not in my pants!, _but shitshitshit! A small, "Uhn," pelted my neck as she felt me, long hard and about to rip through denims. The zipper was scratching my hard-on and May pressed it that much harder against me. The crotch of my pants was tight and May wove down until she cupped my balls and the threads of fabric imprinted my skin. It was gruesomely awesome!

Worse, worse, this was so much worse. I pounded my head against the door again until it rattled in its casing. My eyes screwed shut and she was screwing me with just her hand over my worn jeans!

Palming me into oblivion through my shorts, with her back against the door, sliding her other small hand up all of me under my shirt until she forced it over my head. Half-naked and 100% on fire. She took me to the edge, tugging and pushing, and wristing and fisting me, fishing out every erotic sound in my repertoire…_Fuck me. Oh sweet Jesus! May! Stop! Oh the shit, don't stop!_ I was so far gone all I could do was hold my breath, try to breathe, shudder, gasp, ache, and pine, and lean my forehead against this stupid door, towering over May, inscribing the faultlessness of her body against mine.

It took every goddamned effort, every leashing of my clenched muscles, to keep from hauling her glorious hips up until I speared her. Hard.

_But I wanted to wait. _

And I most certainly did not want to cum in my pants! Not like a horny uncontrollable teen, I was 26 years old for fuck's sake! Hadn't let that shit happen since my twilight teen years, but May made me feel young. _Almost_ like Bella had. _Fuck that and no way!_ I was not thinking about _her_ at a time like this (or even ever again for that matter! My eye socket still twinged as I remembered the sheer force of Edward's fist connecting with my face!).

Fuck me sideways and inside out. _Oh god no, please May, no_! There was no way, after all of the teasing and tempting, I could hold out! My abs were almost as contracted as my dick and she was fucking killing me. Stretched tighter than a snare drum. Not softly. Hotly. Blazingly.

She focused on my head, gripping me in a rigid embrace and shifting up and down so quickly that I filled and spilled the second she put minute pressure on my rim and tip!

Her name roared out of me, wetting the air just as my cum was wetting my shorts, "MAY!"

A full free laugh made its way through the blood-beat-pulse in my ears.

"You think that's funny?" All harsh breathing, eyes narrowed and hooded, dick still twitching and soaking through and through. After my display, she'd better be sopping wet!

A stifled giggle against the structure of my neck, mutual pulses throbbing, "Well, yeah. _And so fucking hot_!"

"You think this is funny too?" Hefting her small weight up against the door, shoving my huge thigh between hers, holding her up in that manner alone, with my knee pressing the cleft of her through her panties revealed by her shunted up skirt, grinding, tits jutting into my face.

"GAH!"

_Now that's more like it!_

Turnabout's fair-play, right? I wanted to bring May to climax in her skirt and panties. She was seeping. I could feel her against me. I pushed a hand between us to work in tandem with my still-sheathed dick that tom-tommed against her. And my knee. Trapping her against the door.

_Fuck it!_ I needed May bare!

And her naked body made me all sorts of stupid. When I pulled up her pale pink tank I was met with globes that had me avid. Topped by the pearls of her nipples. I needed to roughen them up. Toughly, forgetting my pact with myself to play nice, I pinched and pulled and then sucked first one then the other right into my mouth, rasped them with my teeth and was fucking thrilled when May toppled sideways and upward and into me!

Upbraiding her delicious flesh.

Bracing an elbow beside her head, I picked at the prestids of her skirt and opened a path to the heaven below. Pulling apart the woven fabric at the base of her ass, I shimmied both skirt and panties to the floor.

On my knees before May I could not resist. Tickling her clit out of its hiding place, I tapped and rapped it with my tongue until it swelled and shouldered out of the hood of pink flesh, all bright and rosy and sugary. Cotton fuckin' candy. _Mmmm._ My tongue took a devious detour to devour her pussy. To lick fully up and down outside and to propel inside, fast. It was May's turn to twist and turn and flail against this fucking goddamn door!

As soon as she'd orgasmed, sensually, all over me so that I knew the cherry-iron-earthy-fruity spent taste of her, I stood. Wrapping her relaxed limbs about me, arms around my shoulders so that May's face lay sated in my neck, legs around my waist so that May's sweet release warmed and wetted me, I made my way up the stairs to my room.

Cleaned up, rock/cockstar posters gone. Bed made with fresh sheets. Clothes folded and put away neatly. Lights dimmed.

Laying May on my bed, I smiled. Relieved, pent up. Dying to be inside of her.

Standing back two feet I fought the unbidden urge to shuffle my size eleven feet. _Fuckin' fool._ Hooking May's gaze, I picked up my A-game, flashed my trademark panty-wetting, thong-dropping, deep-dimpled grin as I tugged at the button of my cut-offs. Making sure to pull tight to let her know just how rigid and enormous I was for her again.

To no obvious effect.

_Shoulda' known._

Let's see her reaction to _this_. And I lowered the clicking metallic zipper torturously slowly until it reached its juncture. Bending forward I opened the panel and pulled the prison-ish garments down my legs before kicking them off to the side. Stood up straight, erect, _erect_, proud. No longer worried.

"_Oooof!"_ You're damned right.

May looked long and hard, making me even longer and harder…but she didn't simper or whimper. Instead she made a quick recovery and simply stated with a smile, still staring, "Nice to finally meet you." Dragging her half-mast copper eyes up the rest of me, leaving earthquakes rolling across my skin, she licked her lips, "Oh, Jake, you've got a glorious body. A gorgeous cock. I can't wait to fuck you."

My eyes about bugged out of my head! Dirty talk? May? Dirty talkin' sweet May?

Gone, I was so very, very gone!

She slinked off the bed and I was dumbstruck again by the totality of her body, all ivory pale and rich red nipples, the sexy tangle of her triangular landing strip, the long, waving, auburn hair that brushed and blew across her skin like my lips wanted to, and endless, endless legs.

I was made speechless and hesitant and standing stock-still at May's grace as she sauntered to me. Helpless. "Well, well, well," her saturating voice susurrant against my trembling flesh as she stopped a shiver-breath away from me. Tantalizingly, May started to walk around me, tracing her fingertips over me. Making a complete circuit, brushing her pads over my dick base to tip, _twitch-groan, fists-clenched, eyes-closed_, before moving on. Brazenly painting another circle around me, sweeping sensually up my inner thighs. Tickling along the backs of my legs until her hands came to rest on my ass. Squeezing _hard_.

Halting her rotation there, May stood on her tiptoes and melded herself to me. Tits squashed into the muscles of my back, her silky pubes at the bottom of my back, rasping, her arms hooking under my armpits and clutching the front of my giant shoulders. Pressing her face into my spine that was arching away in need and bowing back to her for further contact, I felt her nuzzle-smile-sigh-kiss-lick. And laugh gently, "This was well worth the wait."

_She had no idea!_

Unleashed from my atrophy, I turned into May's embrace and picked her up, settling her legs around my waist and her tits against my chest, my lips pulled at those god-awfully gorgeous nipples and I placed my palms against the cheeks of her ass, swallowing them in whole fistfuls to slip her right up and down my cock so that it was her turn to squeak!

Tearing my eyes from May who was bending back against the constraint of my arms, breasts pounding up into my mouth with each choppy breath, her neck creating a motherfucking vista that needed to be explored, I eyed my fuckstupid bed. I cursed my bachelor's ways for never having invested in a man-sized bed. I looked at the wall, the wall that had seen a lot of action, none of which mattered now. I imagined May against it.

Shaking my head, I dispelled the vision. Not tonight. Tonight I would have May in my bed. I would make my body and hers fit together perfectly and the postage-stamp sized mattress didn't really fucking matter!

Not tonight.

Two long paces and I tipped May onto the mattress and followed suit. Inclined above her, I held my weight up on shaky arms, every single muscle calling out and clamping. Continuing to lick-suck-bite, I tried my best not to bruise with this vicious intent.

Our lips met with inhuman need, fisting hair, twining legs, fastening with our arms and scratching with our nails. Jagged, rusty, tearing, clawing.

My cock was desperately trying to squirrel its way into her lips, through the folds and right into her wetness! I labored and tried to stay aloft, staving off the pounding throb of blood that was propelling me into a downward spiral.

I wanted to dote on May. Instead I was ravaging her like a blind man seeking sight.

She didn't seem to mind.

She was shredding me to pieces and her petite hands on the rigid planes of my back were trying to pull me down onto her, wanting me to crush her.

"Jake, please!"

Every ounce of discipline that I had--which was not really all that much up until this point--was employed as I shuddered and lowered myself, one inch at a time, all the while caressing May's lips with my own, smacking her with my mouth and then retreating until just our breath made contact. A hair's breadth away. My body a second away from clashing with hers. I reclined, descending another inch. Our tongues met. I pushed against her. Tongues raced from her mouth into mine, sucking. I was captured within her arms and her legs trapped me from behind, crashing my cock against the soaking, sweet haven of her glistening lips.

We both reared back as if electrocuted!

Gritting every single muscle in my body, gripping and turning and twisting the quilt at May's sides, I bit out, "Please, May, _please._ I'm trying to be gentle! Uuuuhhh. You've got to stop!"

Looking at me, desperate _for me_, she wrapped her legs that much more forcefully around me until her heels pushed my ass and thus my quivering cock over her, still not _in_ her, she gasped and arched and bared her throat and shoved her nipples up to the air, "Jake! _Oh!_ You can be…_uuuuuh._..gentle, _later_. Make love to me next time. Just fuck me now!"

_I could do that!_

Edging off of May, her looking greedily and pissed off at the void my body left, I pressed a finger to her swollen mouth and _sssshhhd_ her.

Overwrought and smoldering and wanting this more than anything, I backed off the bed and hauled her with me until her ass met the base. Spreading May's thighs so that all of her precious pussy was bare to me, I placed her soles flat on the bedding. Using the moistened fingers that had just met her lips I wound those two into her.

She was on her elbows. Watching.

My head hung down, watching.

"Aaaaah." The tight feel of her was so…._right._

Squirming her hips, "_Oooh."_

I hooked my fingers just so to hit that little pea-sized button right inside of her and May jerked off the bed like a fish dipping the bobber. _I had her now._ Fascination sparked her eyes that still managed to stay open as I swirled out, tugging her moisture with me. And I used it to lube my cock, rubbing lazily, surely, up and down.

Watching.

Waiting.

Both of us.

_I'd waited my whole life for this._

Positioning May's hips and ass and thighs and calves just so, her legs were already quivering, I licked my lips in concentration and then licked hers in appreciation. Keeping my head bent to hers, I wove slowly into her hot, deep, taut, ridged clasp. Controlled and biting back the fucking growls that wanted to escape at the feeling of such complete suitability!

I had to swivel her hips slightly and twist in just the right move to make it all the way into her.

Waiting, watching, I raised my head a scant millimeter to make sure May was okay. She blinked in slow motion, her pelvis turned side to side to make the sheath complete, and she nodded on a gasp of air that flew into my searching face.

"God, yes Jake!"

It was _hot_. My room was an inferno and our bodies were ablaze! Slick and slippery and given the go-ahead I pulled out, all agape and arching and trying not to go crazy! _Fuck me!_ When my tip, so wet with her poontang, was again at her entrance, I ceased all motion to concentrate with all my might on not cumming.

Like a serpentine, at May's inaudible sigh-suck-simper-moan of encouragement, I went at her again. Slightly faster, that much harder. But always all the way in and all the way out.

Pentrating the very depths of her.

Our hips crashed. Tits and torso collided! Lips ripped and bit. Hands held tight and gripped hard, ass, shoulders, necks, hair!

Picking up my pace, I grabbed May's thighs and held them apart. Thinking she could stay still and in place I bore her body down by her shoulder. Made a nest for my face at the juncture of her neck and shoulder and grunted with each faster, harder thrust.

Keeping up with me, May's hips blasted into mine and somewhere off in my mind I worried about the bruises I was inflicting on her sensitive skin. Not enough to stop. Not nearly enough to begin.

When her fingers cupped my ass and started pushing me even more vigorously into her, when her nose and closed eyes and breathy _uuuuhhhhn_ squeals found purchase against my collar bone, thought fled.

In, out, in and out, _all the way in all the way out_, hard and like lightning! _Flash-pulse-pound-throb-flash-pulse-pound-throb._

Wet, sweaty, moaning, groaning, growling, little snippets of non-words and humid musky damp air.

_Oh the…!_

_What the fuuu?_

_Uh…yeeeessss!_

_M, mn, nnnnn, mmmmm!_

_Gah!_

_Oh lorrrr…!_

We convulsed! Her hips jacked up against me and pulverized. Infinite repeat. My free arm reaching down to the bed beside May's head. Bearing up, bearing down, and beating in. Beating out. And done. So fucking, fucking done!

One still final moment in this clash of the titans. Both of us bending against and into and under and beneath and over each other. Static electricity. Lightning.

_Collapse._

Breathy giggles…_May_.

Husky laugh…_me_.

Breathless, _both of us_.

Flopping onto the bed, threatening to break its weak wooden frame with the groan it grudged against me, I rolled onto my back a bit more gingerly. _Replete_. Swept May over me. _Satisfied_.

On my chest, dimpling and tweaking my piercing, when her breath had calmed, the words I'd been hoping for but never really expected came out, "And did I forget to say I love you too?" May, making it so blasé and easy and simple.

Perfection. _Home_. No longer waiting.

I inhaled her scent that was joined with the smell of _us_, I smiled, tucked her head beneath my chin then chuckled at her next question, "Now, what are we going to do about this pathetic little bed? Baby, I thought you were going to break it in two!"

Limp, laughing, and totally everything I had ever been searching for!

May had laid a mark across my soul. _Forever._

* * *

**A/N: So yeah, Jake. Because he's just a boy-man caught up in the play of something beyond himself. Because I know there are those of you that hate the idea of Jacob and Bella, and there are also those reading this that are rooting for Jacob and Bella…I myself always despised his pull over Bella (in canon), but during the course of writing this and reading other fanfics, contemplating Jacob in the real stories, I've come to the conclusion that though he manipulated Bella's actions to some degree (with the kiss outside of the tent in Eclipse), his only true crime was to be there for her in her time of need and to love her immensely (that's what I think). And that's not really a crime at all. So my boy needed to find **_**his **_**voice. **

**Hope you enjoyed.**

**Now, I know some of y'all have actually put this on your faves and alerts (imagine my indescribable joy and wonder!)...won't some of you please send me some love?**

_**And now, back to your regularly scheduled program of Bella and Edward and "Why?"**_


	7. Glorious

**Glorious**

_Rose-tinted view  
And satellites that compromise the truth  
I wanted more  
With the cuts and the bruises  
Touch my face  
A hopeless embrace_

Faith, it drives me away  
But it turns me on  
Like a strangers love  
It rockets through the universe  
It fuels the lies, it feeds the curse  
We, too, could be glorious

I need to believe  
But I still want more  
With the cuts and the bruises  
Don't close the door  
On what you adore

Faith, it drives me away  
But it turns me on  
Like a strangers love  
It rockets through the universe  
It fuels the lies, it feeds the curse  
We, too, could be glorious

**I've posted this stunning Muse song, along with other tidbits for various chapters, on my profile. _Check_ **_**it**_** as well as my other stories!**

**To V, my muse and my master beta (she is mine, **_**all mine I say!)**_**…I thank you. **

**And speaking of Miss Mightylicious, she felt she needed a word with y'all…this is all vanessarae, and I adore her!: "**_**As some of you may know, I was not thrilled with this idea in the beginning. But because I love Rie, I backed her up like I have before. Now, after it is said and done, I swear that if those of you reading never showed any ounce of emotion or recognition of any kind to any scene in here, than thou art more of a cold-hearted bitch than I. And that is saying a lot. This story made me question my own views and stances on topics at hand, and I don't take them lightly in the least. I thoroughly enjoyed this ending, and honestly put off beta-ing it because I knew it was the end." **_

**I think what she means to say (think of me as Jake translating Edward) is REVIEW! And she might even send you cookies.**

**Disclaimer: So, this **_**is**_** the end, and I **_**do**_** own it! However, Mizz Meyer holds the keys to the kingdom of Twilight. I've just taken a few pages and some delicious characters out of her books. **

* * *

I awoke to hot lips on _my _hot, wet lips. Between my legs, my engorged flesh pushed outwards and into Edward's devout kisses, using only his pursed, poised, and talented mouth to swiver against me, _at first_. Supple. I smiled, moaned, and leaned back and onto Edward's arms that cooled the flushed skin of my ass as he cradled me all along my tremulous thighs, hands stroking over and under and between.

"_Why_, Bella, it seems as though you've been waiting for me…," Edward, home from a very late shift. Shifted against me in sultry desire, his voice gritty and gruff with an edge of fatigue that was tempered by the tightened wire of sensuality; feeling his face between my legs made me just want to lick the sexy sculptured planes of his cheeks, his forehead, his soft eyelids, and firm lips inside out.

"_Why?_' I heard that question often. It was only a repetitive part of life. But every single time someone said it, even one year on from the fact, my decimating act, whether they were talking to me or someone else, threw me straight back to that morning. It haunted me. It reminded me. It made me proud and thankful and somewhat sickened once again.

Just three little letters.

I had been taken aback by that question, all quiet and tortured, crumbling Edward's lips as he pronounced that singular word with my hands linked to his after we'd made love, after he had tasted the despair and sorrow of my tears, with my heart beating over his on his chest, in sync, trying to conjoin forever. My heart _in his hands._ I shouldn't have been surprised. No mere "I'm sorry" was going to slay this demon.

That night that Edward had come home to me, that ended with the bang of our souls reuniting was only the beginning of hard times to come.

He'd asked why. How could I explain that it had nothing to do with him, everything to do with myself? That I had been at once enlivened by the changes within myself, the reawakening of _myself_, and felt stagnantall at the same time? But I had to, that was my task and there was no other remedy. No deus ex machina that would save us from these carnivorous gallows. Just my voice, probing out letters to form the stumbling words that could possibly limp us away from this crucifixion.

And we met that dawning of the new day that had started out all misty haze, glowing pink but emblazoning into the brightest of sun-shattering illuminations, in an embrace that turned into fists that were half-hearted in their tiny, unhurtful hammers and quickly weakening, giving in fast this time to hands that opened and clasped in granular grips on naked skin as we sat with sheets pooling at our waists. Facing each other with gutted faces, tears sobbing and snotty and sniveling, running over with never quite perfect enough apologies.

All made bare. Every last single broken bit of me. Opened, like my trickling admissions that cultivated with unstoppable force into a flood of everything that had been wrong, _was_ wrong, with me.

Dissonant.

My words tarnished, my voice corroded, "Edward," I leaned forward and grasped his hopeful-hateful-unlocked face in the palms of my hands that did not balk as much as my heart and mind did, not knowing exactly what I was going to say next, "I fell in love with you the very moment I fell _into_ you!"

I paused just this once to smile at the memory. And that smile faded with my next unveiling, "You were awesome! You were fucking awe-inspiring! So fucking gorgeous. The first time we met against those stupid, drab, green lockers, you saved me with all of your instinctive suaveness."

I shook my head, still trying to swipe away the wonder, lifting my perplexed eyes, "There was something so extraordinary about your solitariness. I had watched you, surreptitiously, my first day at Forks. Saw _you_, always apart. Ever graceful and in position and unspoiled, but _apart_. To be honest, I thought you were just another high school prick who was far too full of himself!"

Edward grinned at that exclamation. But I wouldn't stop until the grin was gone, "When you wrapped me up into your arms, when you stared into my eyes, when _you_, Edward-untouchable-Cullen—in the course of that one day I'd already heard the talk about you from all the turned down and tuned out tweenagers—looked at me so intently, I was lost."

And I didn't even realize all this was true until the words propulsed out of me.

"I _wanted_ to be lost. There was no way you could take me as I was! You were…_good god_, you were flawless! And me? I was just…Bella. Broken-down Bella. Yeah. So I pushed and shoved and shook away parts of me that were not at all attractive. Hurt and pain and insecurity. Pitiful. I became nonchalant, brave, and insouciant! All so that I could make myself commendable of your most unlikely attention, _at first_, and then, _JESUS_, how could you love me? Your love was totally improbable! And I wanted it more than anything in the world! I would become a completely different Bella just to have you shine that crooked smile at me!"

So I had seen it then, and so I had continued to believe it for nearly twenty years, amending myself into what I thought was necessary. Bella, the abridged version. Not believing Edward could ever truly, wholly, and entirely love the real me. So that this edited adaptation of me ended up brewing, boiling, roiling and festering. My ultimately fucking Jake was just one symptom of the diseased me, riddled through with ragged holes of the disintegration eating me from the inside out. Secreted beneath the drug cocktail of wine and words and books and flowers and sex toys and feeling suddenly sexy and strangely confident, and worthwhile and wanting something more to remember the me I used to be, should have been, and could have been! Toiling and troubling, ripping soul-deep fragments of me apart, creating a husk, hard and desiccated and again not really me, that housed a Bella that was quickly dissolving into a mire of self-doubt and disappreciation. All of me gory and not one bit glorious, and a paradox that was a palindrome, and me, not me, backwards and front to back and inside out with ends that could not meet!

All off-the-cuff.

As my words leaked out, the utterly gross truth of them killed me and murdered Edward. One. More. Time.

It was never him.

"It was never you, Edward. Absolutely never! But it was _always_ you that moved me so much. Deep down I'd always been busted up, felt unworthy, knowing there was some other me inside that I didn't want to identify, that I, me, the realest other-me, could not credityour love! Not you. _Not you._"

"I was never pretty enough, certainly not stunning enough to warrant your attention."

"I was this squirmy little newbie. Never been touched. Never been kissed."

"I came from a house filled with hate and anger. While you, _you_ were made from the gods themselves! Carlisle and Esme, prestigious and ideal examples of parenthood!"

I shook my head hard, glancing at Edward. He was stricken and morbidly biting his lips to beat back words, but a few escaped, "No, Bella, no!" all the while nodding his head. It was as if inside he knew the truth of what I was asserting. Attesting to the exactness and detesting what I was admitting all at the same time. Tearing my two halves apart and shoving them in his face and not asking him to put me back together again, for once. I would do it; I _could_ do it, myself.

In remembrance, I smiled slightly, "And my sense of style. Fuck me, Edward! I looked like a dumpster-diving ragamuffin next to you, Mr. Take-a-page-out-of-GQ and fucking rocking it!"

This time my grin was wide and I licked my lips, "God! You in a narrow tie and jacket and I just want to rip the cufflinks from your wrists and wrap that strap around my arm until I choke you against my mouth. Suffocate you with my desire! I will _always_ feel _that_."

Edward allowed himself a lascivious smirk at my proclamation of just how fresh and forever he made me. It was a step. An imbalanced baby-step.

The guilt and twenty-odd years of self-loathing cascaded out of me and I longed to put a stopper in my mouth! Edward's head was hanging down but I would not have that. I needed the visual. My hands tore up his neck and over his strong jaw, my fingers walked surely across his grim lips. Into his hair, all copper craziness, and pulled it back with the most chary of touches until he raised himself up.

"Please, Edward, it was not your fault. None of this! I beg your forgiveness and nothing more except that you will love me. All of me!"

He started to speak and I shushed him tacitly, shook my head because he had nothing on this humiliation that kept roiling forth, "No, baby no. I know. _Shhhhh_," I soothed his hair and lingered over the warped lines of his brow, "_Shhhh_." Locking his eyes with mine, seeking the winged brightness of his spirit, I quieted him, "_You would love me however I was. _You will love me in every way that I am_. I know. _I am sorry to have held myself apart, and to have held _that_ against you_. Shhhh_. Every molecule of me belongs to you_; every particle of you is mine. Shhhhh._"

As if we had not spent enough liquid yet, silent knowing tears tumbled from both our welling eyes.

Declaring all of this, my dark, dirty, rank, and buried depths, to his eyes. Orbs, so light so swampy, jade and black and glints of gold, I watched the understanding unfold. Saw it absorbed into those spheres that widened with somberness, and lips that fell open with shunted gasps. Cheeks that lifted up and pulled down alternately. Above it all was his hair that had been through the wringer, tortured by my hands, belted against the bed, whirling madly and softly and toppling onto his forehead. Begging my caress, my touch, my kiss.

I pulled my boy, my man, my warrior, _my_ Edward, into my naked breasts.

Resonant.

His damp warm face plunged between my tits. And though his words were smote against my flesh, I heard them, "Bella, I forgive you _everything_. _Always_."

And even though I didn't really want it, Edward felt the need to explain his actions. I just wanted to pardon _him_, console him, help him erase the memory and not even have to go _there_ more than I already had. Cowardice still tamed me. I was all ready to put on my hardhat and ear-guards and drown out the sonorous low rumbling of his voice, but rubbing it all out would do no good. We'd learned that much. So I listened. I took in all of his remorse. Made it mine. Stronger. Bigger. Coming to an eclipse filled with reconciliation.

But still Edward's moment with Zaf, not twelve hours earlier, was like a dagger dragging through my gut up into my chest, right before it dug deep to cause a shredded gash through my sternum and sideways into my heart that was just beginning to take up this newest beat.

My treachery twinned with his duplicity.

The sun heated us in our despoiled bed. No longer despots, but greedy and needy all the same. And that fucking bright sunlight shattered every single, shitty, last disillusion. The bruises on my skin, the cuts I'd inflicted with my nails upon Edward's unflinching chest, were reminders of the wounds I had caused our souls. The unending night _did_ end; the arms of the day _did_ open to us, alive and together. It felt healing. But we were not that naïve, not this time. It would take more than this night-turned-day to plaster over the gashes we had punched into each other's essence. And even when they were sewn shut, the scars would always remain. There was no going back to our outwardly unblemished beauty, but these scores could be beautiful too if allowed to heal properly; they spoke of living and experience and war and recovery. Convalescence into rehabilitation.

In the days that followed, shrouded in our sanctuary, we took a good hard look at each other, ourselves, our marriage.

Not that our marriage had been lacking; it wasn't a lie or a ruse or a sham. But I had slacked on the job, basing my performance on three-quarter truths. And it should never have been a performance in the first place. There was no such thing as wedded bliss, and this was not a showpiece that I needed to act my way through. Misconceptions, perceptions that were skew-if, squiffy. Off-base and off-balance. Ideas of inequality and lesserness and otherness, coloring reactionson both our sides.

And now there was me, the real me, all serrated, broken glass-shards and mirror images and echoes of my past and delicate, unknown future promise….all the fuck of me on full view. Only for Edward. And there was all of him, he that I had always venerated a bit too much. Now, with us both bottomed out, we were on equal footing. And climbing, with each other as support, back to the top of the sheer cliff face. Or maybe just an overhanging ledge in the middle. We need not soar to such idealistic heights again. Assuaging and massaging and loving and pleading guilty to sins.

_Forgive me for I have sinned_. I had loved Edward, _and_ felt undeserving, because he had saved me. I had loved Edward for the way he saw me.

I forgave Edward his indulgence. For the idealistic way he envisioned me, as an untouchable, unattainable goddess who needed to be rescued, whose presence he'd been blessed with, and whose soothing, silent, hushed thoughts put an end to the beastly meanderings of everyone else.

To come together not with humility but with equality.

Though it was all a vast mistake, _it _became a conduit for something more than we'd ever had.

After those first terrifying hours of shadow we did not make love for two months, and then several months more. Intimacy was more important. Desire was displaced for touching and re-learning. Teasing, caressing, feeling, and rediscovering all of the myriad planes of flesh that we'd grown so used to.

Hunkered down, bunkered in, just trying to get _back_ to us, _forward_ across the dicey rope and beaten plank bridge to us.

We kissed more. We made out like teenagers! And it was delightful. Delicious! Holding hands in public, pent-up but not through desperation, just infatuation and acceptance and newness. I'd never scoff at PDAs again!

It was a rebirth, our renaissance. A new era in the making. Our summer solstice.

Mitigated by yet more declarations.

That thing Edward had wanted to discuss, seated at his piano, waiting patiently for me while he pittled away at the keys on that auspicious day. The thing he never got the chance to speak of, the reason he had so tenderly made a bowl of my belly the daybreak we'd attempted to come back together, he finally shared with me. Midsummer found us back at that gleaming instrument and all the pain we'd worked through came roaring back with a sonic boom! While I was fucking my way to hell and back with Jake across the road, Edward was attending me _in our home_ with thoughts of making a family! Wanting to ask me, for the first time, if I would reconsider my deal-breaker. Wanting our own child to pitter-patter across the floors with sweet, tiny, unsteady feet. A beloved to send the simple beating of our hearts into a tinny excited pitter-patter rhythm of pure love. Worried and anxious and excited, Edward had tilled away at his keys, working through the very first song he had orchestrated for me while I was getting chafed inside out by Jake.

I cried one more time at this ceaseless grief, wondering when it would end.

Stalemated. Stalled.

I shied away, instantly petrified! I'd proven myself the quintessential _enfant terrible_ and to learn that on that day of annihilation, Edward had been gearing himself up to ask me to re-evaluate having our own child?

_Selfish, selfish bitch_. I mentally slapped myself. Hard. Shamed. I shoved away my past, my pitiful, near-sighted, utterly self-centered proclamation that I could never be a mother simply because I'd never had a true mother. _I was built of better things than that_. Suddenly I saw and knew and understood that I was more stalwart than that! I'd known-- almost thrown away, and fucking worked hard to regain—true, earth-shattering, spine-tingling, heart racing, life ending _true_ love! Maybe I _could_ give this to Edward. Maybe I _could_ do this?

Maybe, just _maybe_, this was just another slice of me I'd lost by the wayside, disregarded and denied.

I was engaging the possibility, still not quite emancipated enough to accept it.

In the months that followed, three more quick yet oddly lingering months, I understood afresh just how much I'd taken a wrecking ball to our marriage. All onus was on me to salvage it.

I ventured into the reclamation yard of all our tumbled-down doors, windows, roofs, and floors. I kept restoring, shoring up the building blocks that we had bulldozed with me in the driver's seat, the historic architecture of our love, relying on the fundamentals, the foundations. Searching through the debris and rubble and refuse for the hard-to-find squandered missing pieces. That which had become squalid and rancid was removed and replaced.

I fit new parts into old places, filling gaps, caulking seeping and oozing holes. Made renovations to our formerly frail careening house of cards with cement and stone and sure-fitted firmament.

A new genre, a wiser, deeper, been-to-hell-and-back-again, _bought the fucking t-shirt_, take on the old. Neoclassical, Victorian, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo; Edward and I revisited every period of us.

One afternoon while the hot sun scorched through me, its gleaming rays finding me at the very beginning of a glorious fall while I labored in the garden, covered in the shouldn't-have-been mugginess, not at this time of year and not here, sweat tracking down my spine to pool at the small of my back, glancing off my eyelashes and spattering to the ground. Dirt streaked across my forehead where I'd pushed my hair aside when the up-puff of air from my mouth no longer did the trick, knees encrusted in grime, fingernails blackened with earth. Edward, who had sat on the patio reading his newspaper, set it aside quietly and paced across the emerald dappled lawn towards me. His shadow casting a tall form amongst those of the pines and maples and oaks until it stopped short behind me. The sun to my back altered and alerted me to his presence as his silhouette lengthened over mine.

My fuming breath halted.

Braless, wearing the barest shreds of panties, in a sundress that hardly met my upper thighs when I leaned over in the privacy of our six foot tall fenced-in backyard, I was not trying to tease Edward, _well perhaps a little_. After our self-enforced no-fucking guidelines I was like a bitch in heat! It had been five months. Five fucking insane months since we'd made love, _fucked_, had sex. And every look in all that long time was searing, every touch baking, every kiss passionately promising that which we weren't certain we were ready for yet.

_God_! I was now so ready that I went about my daily business all pent-up and randy, swollen and liquid and desiring even the touch of my panties, my skirt whispering between my legs, my blouse and lace little naughty balconette brassieres plucking up the erect tips of my nipples.

I couldn't even think about Edward performing the simplest tasks without a sex-rash flushing my creamy skin. Reading the paper, his hands and strong wrists flicking the thin newsprint pages put me in mind of those selfsame appendages riffling over my tits. Sucking the smudge of type off his thumbs and all I saw was his mouth slipping over my pinkening nips; goggling while Edward glided his limber digits over the black and ivories as I sat mesmerized beside him on the slim piano bench, only half-listening as he effortlessly composed new symphonizations that were at once joyful and deeply sensual. Listing into him, seeking the skin-on-skin contact from his athletic legs that were half-bare in khaki shorts, and my own curves revealed by my itty-bitty, airy dresses. Arms brushing, static electricity humming. And the beads of sweat that formed on his taut forearms, his forehead almost hidden beneath the swag of the silkiest bronze mess of hair, and above his sculpted _chef d'oeuvre_ of a mouth, tempting me to lick the divot of skin just above his top, firm, berry-colored lips. That dewy perspiration was not due to his musical movements. Edward was as captivated as I by every single muffled groan and graze, bursting with need! When we hugged, I felt his rigid, stiff, longest of long cocks reaching against me. I did not know where he found the fortitude to continue this idea that our newfound luscious closeness should continue to preclude sex!

In the garden, horny as hell, feeling Edward's formidable shape lowering and lowing against me, plowing against me until one of his arms reached over my shoulder. His hand bit into the freshly tilled soil only an inch away from my own that was now strangling the delicate bruised black-purple aquilegia I had been about to drop into the earth. His other splayed hand sliced a neat unfaltering groove up my inner bent-at-the-knees legs, seeking the soaking splendor of my pussy, wired like phosphorescent heat-lightning speeding indolently across a humid summer night-sky. I nearly blurted out, "Fuck me hard, and fast and NOW, Edward!" But I bit my tongue on the outburst and whimpered almost silently instead, squashing my thighs together, clamping one of my bone-tight hands and one of Edward's in between.

And my mind raced back to imagery that pushed eroticism further into my seared mind. _Flashing, flashing, flashing_. Heat lightning. Edward, nimbly preparing a meal and feeding me from the old warped wooden spoon, _spooning me_, competently replacing my windshield wiper blades and bending into the opened hood of my car to check the oil, _bending me over the back of the cracked and crackling leather sofa, jeans open, panties ripped off_. Flicking, sucking, gliding, nimble, competent, bending…Fuck. Me. Now.

"Bella," Edward's hot breath bombarded my neck, shimmying up and down, "I know we decided to wait, but _Jesus!, _I'm going crazy here! _Enough!_"

"God yes, Edward!" Tearing great chunks of mulch out with me as I turned desperately beneath his clasp, I met his mouth and grappled him to me, falling back into foliage that would stain my eyelet white dress with irremovable green chlorophyll! My legs opened wide, his khakis wrestled in all four of our hands to his ankles, the belt clanging against the bitten old brick border, two strokes of all of our fingers, _all of our fingers,_ up and down his cock that was light brown and purple and all veins and heat and silk and filled, and two strokes of all of our twenty fingers over and some _into_ and round my cunt that was always wet but now swollen to a ridiculous state!

I still held the deadly columbine threaded through my fingers, strangling its leggy end-of-season stalk, its petals torn out in a 'He-loves-me, he-loves-me-not' tempo. Ending with _he loves me, surely._

My skirt thrown up, just like my breasts when Edward wrenched them free of the deep v-neck, pinestraw bit into my elbows and the thorns of ground-creeping raspberry vines smidged into my leaning back elbows. Edward bit me, tongued me, licked me, but did not at all tease me as he eased into me. We could not wait! A quick thrust and both of us deeply, "Ooooh FUCK!" So even if the neighbors couldn't see us, they could hear us on this vibrantly lit afternoon and it just did not matter at all!

Edward was bigger and deeper and all-reaching and all-satisfying. I was wetter, harder, more needful, and tighter!

There was simply nothing better on this earth.

With my ass scraping against the bricks, opening fresh scratches, Edward propped me up slightly and propelled even more vigorously so that we crushed the deep red-purple ferns that had plumed against my back. The back of my head met the sugar maple that sprouted and soared majestically into the air above us, creating a tiered ceiling with the pines and oaks.

Bushy and burgeoning.

Bark scored me as he shored me up. Showered me with intense strokes. My knees lent over his swimmer's hips, all sinew, my heels gathered his tight ass harder, and we were hell-bent on outshining the world with our need.

It didn't take long.

Because Edward was so long and knew just the right twist-roll-thrust-plunge to hit my most sensitive little pearl! He _was_ all-knowing! And now he knew every single thing there was to know about me.

Push.

Pulse.

Reach.

Grab.

Before I knew it, Edward was on his knees before me, pulling my calves that much higher, I was flung into a shockwaves and cataclysms and the end of it all and the beginning of everything! With my hips mashing so solidly against Edward's, feeling the forever-slam of his cock, his balls, into me, over me, into me…_into me_, a little finger-flick-fuck was all it took for my head to pound right back into the maple, sticky, juicy, tacky gum tangling into my hair, the slightest twinge of worry that I'd just caused myself a concussion not even dimming the white-hot fire that made a doused inferno of my cunt.

"Bella, FUCK. Bella, Bella, Bella, _FUCK!_" And this new mantra was better than any platitude!

Jetting and pulsing and throbbing and reaching and gut-hard cum shooting right up into me!

And then laughing.

Giddy and shaking and giggling and fucking silly with it all!

In our backyard. Demolishing the bed I'd just planted. Disintegrating any idea our neighbors may have had of us as the quintessential little yuppie couple with our raving mad fuck-spree!

Our foreheads shone. Our smiles gleamed brighter. Our chuckles and spent-whispers muted.

Edward lifted me in his strong arms, shucked off his khakis and let loose my dress. Made his way, with me placidly pulled all around his torso and thighs and waist, into _our house_.

That was_ the moment_ of completion. Repletion. We'd been through our end of days, suffered through the drought of hard times to come. Met each other on equal footing for the barren worst nightmares, holding on so tightly and not willing to let go. Battled hand-in-hand, side-by-side through bleak and bitter reasons to release until we sought and reached for and discovered and pined for an utterly new season to become us. The summer, autumn, winter of our love gone wrong and then finding rightness and turning into the fresh, blossoming spring that was within us.

Surprisingly, life did continue. All the clichés about time healing wounds and _yadda, yadda, yadda_ came to ring true.

This start was not fresh, but neither was it old. Those summer-turned autumn months had been fraught with traps and snares and landmines. Not destined to be sidestepped. We hurtled straight through them all, blowing off limbs, amputated, and substituting parts with _un_-artificial limbs. Our hearts, boggled and bamboozled, the only bits of yesterday that remained even close to recognition. Bracing each other for explosion, and steadfastly negating imminent collapse. Looking _The End_ in the eye and telling it to fuck right off!

There was no going back. So we pioneered. Forged ahead. Weary. Wary. Wiser. There were wilder moments too. Zealous, frenzied, full-on fucking. There was love making. There was raunch and teasing and taunts and lust and always _the reminder_ that made our need for closeness even greater than all the rest. Abreast of it all were the moments of joy, the hints of peace. Sensuality and eroticism and love and agony, _total fucking agony_, collided into one scepter that became the new Bella and Edward.

Eye-opening disclosures abounded as we revisited the notion of making a family time and again; it was put on the table, one more card in our strengthening hand.

My fledgling self-confidence should have been shot, but fighting tooth and nail, hand-in-hand with Edward, _for_ Edward _and_ me, I became that Phoenix. I was able to lay to rest, to say a final eulogy to the miserable existence I had known pre-E.

And Edward no longer set me up too high. We were both humbled. Hurt gave way, _eventually_, to hubris and gratitude, and a love that was deeper because of imperfection and spurious betrayal rather than innocent purity.

What we ended up with was not a perfect representation. A mish mash of the two of us as we used to be, those bits of us that were unbreakable; innovative joinery that had no need for hammer and nail, a timber-frame that was made tight and perfectly shunted together through sheer artistry and craftsmanship and hard, long, sweaty slogging.

During all this time, we became each other's Scheherazade, in just the same manner as when this whole hurtful bittersweet thing began I would read nightly to Edward of the works of Anaïs Nin. Now we read not _from_ books, but _of_ each other. Not from invention, not as a servant or minor or a beholden telling stories to the King of Persia. Our daily tales were as mundane as what we ate for lunch and who we ran into at Starbucks or what inanities transpired during trips to the library. Delving as far back as memories of Christmas mornings when we still believed in Santa and watched the twinkly, cold, Christmas Eve midnightness for signs of his sleigh arching across the blackness, with our presents in red velvet sacks, and the jangle of his reindeer's bells charging into our dreams!

Every single thing we could remember, and even stuff we just bullshitted about. At the table during dinner, swinging our hands as we strolled around the bustling square on market day, squeezed pleasantly against each other on Sunday mornings with steaming mugs of coffee and donuts and newspapers and books and notes and jumbles of ideas flowing between us.

First kisses, first touches, fooling around. We even revisited that first game of yesteryears that was precursor of sexuality to come. Playing doctor…_we played doctor_! So much better with real props, a cold stethoscope and Edward in his scrubs and white coat, balls-out and commando beneath, and my fetish for absolutely all of him in any and every single unmentionable way grew ten-thousand fold!

Full circle. One complete rotation around the sun. Now and here and all present and accounted for. It was spring again. The windows were open to the light lukewarm breeze that wafted through sheer curtains, deepest middle of the night extinguishing the clouds and stars and even the moon. I'd been supine on the bed. Asleep, gloriously dreaming of Edward. The golden-brown lantana that mirrored my eyes was blooming beneath our mailbox. The perfume of fresh-cut grass, made damp with dew, I inhaled deeply and gasped. I groaned and clasped Edward's slowly swiveling head between my legs.

Awakened to his fiery mouth and tongue stroking, sampling. Dipping in and pulling me out. Making one hand into a receptacle for my heavy breasts that were rich with the liquid gold of colostrum and his other hand reaching up to drape languidly over my budding belly. My filled womb. Enclosing me. Enfolding the home of our baby. And still his succulent tongue made sweet satisfying work of my soaking wetness.

Wonderment.

Amazement.

Joy.

Inside this new house, we made room for one more.

Translating that little plastic prophetic piss strip with shaky hands and blurry eyes, reading and re-reading the symbols on the blueprint of fertility, I had been instantly petrified! Edward gave me privacy but I could hear his pace-pace-pace-stop-pace-pace-pace outside the bathroom door for five long minutes while my pee raced up the window and immediately inscribed a plus sign. _Pace-stop-pace-halt-sigh-pace_, I heard his hand sweep down over the door and visualized his forehead all covered in disheveled copper locks resting against the closed aperture.

Battling against sea-legs, bracing myself, trying on a smile for size and not quite getting it right, I opened the door and Edward almost tumbled in. There were no words to describe my distinctly paradoxical clamoring of fear and the furor of hope that propelled through me. I simply held up the urine-stained wand, nodded my head once, smile-frowned with my toast-dark eyes into Edward's widening, brightening, tearing-up eyes!

Beating back the desire to cower beneath his immediate congratulatory hug, I grabbed Edward's gorgeous face and pulled back, just for one second, so he could read and understand and come to grips with my fear-mingled faith. Drops of everything we'd been through and all that was to come made giant tears that shed from our awed eyes. Moving my hands lower and loosening my tightened knuckles, Edward held them both straight over his heart that pounded within his chest. His free hand melded into the side of my face, brushing away tears, holding my cheek and then lowering to my neck. Closing off the verdant grassiness of his eyes with glistening tips of lush eyelashes, he sighed with peace against my mouth, a breath-beat away, "Bella, my love, I understand _everything. _It _will be _okay." Not in banality but in knowing. His lips lazed across mine. Pursed and soft, silenced beneath gratitude. Just once before he leant back, "It will be okay, Bella. But you must tell me _everything_. And whatever you are feeling, whatever I am feeling, we will work through together, _this time_." The corners of his mouth could no longer contain the grin of utter happiness that swelled his smile upwards! Our next kiss was a meeting of opened mouths, man and woman, husband and wife!

Plus one.

My womb was full. Not of black butterflies but of our unborn child. And my heart was bursting. It had been an easy road; that alone scared me. I had not expected facileness. _Not for me_. Where was my comeuppance? But I hoped the fates, God, Mother Nature, or who-the-fuck-ever called the shots in the grandest scheme of things, would keep this compassion up and continue to show such mercy…_at least for Edward_.

I became even more ungainly, who would have thought that possible? I grew to epic proportions. My tits swelled and were not nearly reined in enough. Ripe, round, rotund.

Fecund.

Fertile.

Earthy.

Every bit of me was loved by Edward, and mulled over by me. Bemused, amused, intrigued and beginning to grow in excitement over meeting this new tiny creature that jutted little elbows and feet and a hard head under my stretched skin.

My mate, my man, _my_ Edward soothed the bruised skin of my belly with his astonishingly sonorous hands, joined himself to me with all of his body and every bit of his soul, and we succored our still-healing love in slightly cautious, sensual sex. Wondering at the being we were making and growing, just like my flowers taking seed and blossoming to fruition. Stronger. Together. Sage. Open, honest, and hopeful.

Was I scared pantless in all of this? _Lord yes_. Was I a mess? _Hell yes_, that was a given. Was I going to fuck up? _Without doubt_. But I didn't even think twice about putting a brave face on this new wondrous thing, motherhood and fatherhood-to-be. I spilled my guts to Edward about my every insecurity…bonding, breastfeeding – the only person I'd fed nightly from my breasts was Edward and he certainly wasn't after mother's milk--, burping, bulging-with-shit-nappies! And what the fuck was with pacies? I was terrified. And buoyant. I felt…_motherly_. Not one bit melancholic as I had always imagined.

Mothering instincts did not pass me by!

Through it all the Luna Moth was stretching with me giggling at its deformity. Cocoa butter massages comforted my flesh and still Edward headed to that home each dusk. That brilliant green gem on my hipbone expanded beyond recognition, just like me. A giantess among her own kind. And that's exactly how I felt! Not just bodily, but within me! All of me; the old me, the new me…all rolled into one that still had slight dents and dips but, god I was _whole_! And unchained from the lockdown of my own making! Flowing. Flying. Soaring!

Now, _here_, tonight, middle of the night with Edward just returning home from his shift at the hospital and heading straight to the Promised Land, against my back and below my hips. My body, in this expectant state, was even more responsive than before and we took full advantage. With me all that much more gripping, heavy inside and out with child, Edward loved to shelter himself in the asylum of my pussy. Plush and overflowing with life.

Not death.

Not defilement.

Full of everything. Both of us.

Inside me. Inside of Edward.

So gentle. Fastidious. Making love. Cradling _me_. Nurturing _him_. Nesting. Swaddling into each other and nestling with Edward at my back, spooning me into a new shape; me a new woman and him a changed man.

Coddling.

Better people.

Braver people.

He lifted my thighs apart with one of the fondest hands ever fashioned, his lips velvet and whispering molten, golden love over my upmost shoulder and following the path down into the arching curvature of my spine. Full, plump belly thrust forward and resting sidewise on the bed. Situating himself inside of me, unhurriedly parting my weeping lips with his splendid cock. Sighing. Swaying. Adoring. Once inside, all the way enclosed, Edward groaned into the back of my neck, nosing my longer, shoulder-length hair aside to lick the drops of sweat that leisurely tracked down.

"_Beautiful_."

Grabbed a handful of my ass and opened me further. I tilted back yet more, curving my bum into his groin and ground against his hugely satisfying erection, not wanting him to leave and crying out harshly when he un-rooted himself.

"_More_! Edward, more, please," my body a thing of pure feeling, a pyre fueled by new life, _not death_, and every thrust and feather-kiss and whisper-lick-caress touched nerves that were like bared conducting copper wires with the intense synaptic reactions this pregnancy created within me!

He swept broad hands to the front of me, one coming underneath me to cup my ballooning breasts, pushing them together so that he could press and flicker and palm both milk-filling globes at the same time. His other hand drawing sweetly over my top hip to fold over my womb. Following the curve down my _linea negra_ with his solitary index finger, tickling me despite myself so that I giggled into the body pillow I'd been biting before! All gaggling stopped as soon as that finger whiled its way in an unwavering line from my convex belly button to my engorged clit. Tapping, sliding, teasing, and rapping. And then straight-on _pulsing_ in time to his magnificent dick that plunged in and out, long strokes, wide strokes, swirling on meeting me fully so that his balls pushed against me.

I ground back and lifted up and into Edward as much as I could. My neck thrown back so that he could easily blast away at the throbbing veins therein. _Tongue and teeth_.

Slapping, slippery, gushing sounds! Slithering. So fucking sexy! Every time we fucked I thought there was no way Edward could be bigger, go harder, faster, reach further! But he did. Every. Single. Fucking. Time!

I was going to break my neck trying to reach back to meet his lips!

He _could_ read my mind. Edward rolled out of me, singularly. Long-lastingly. I moaned and bit and whined and reared at the way he tasseled out of me. Holding his head within me for two tense seconds before pulling that big bit out too so that I could feel every svelte vein and the rigid edge slip out. "_Oh fuck me!" _I wept.

Hunkering up on one ridiculously muscled arm, fully upstretched, Edward leaned forward over my lax lust-ridden body that was all gasps and chesty juts and whining need. A hand paved between my deep cleavage, separating and twinkling once, twice, three times from nipple to nipple. Fondling my protuberant navel. Working between my thighs to the moist hair and puffy clit and lips that hungered for his blissful touch.

Turning over that hand, opened all the way, winded up over my thigh and down below the back of my knee. His hard grasp there caused my breath to stop completely and compelled my leg to hitch up higher, and over. So I was that much more open to him.

Still high up on that one striking arm, Edward found purchase inside of me, harder this time. And when my upraised leg stayed in place, he brought his fingers to my under-cheek and turned my head to his. Our moans meeting. Breath halting. Lips touching. Tongues reaching. Mouths. Mouths with liquid amber wetness and the deepest of all kisses! _God! _This felt so very right!

With his cock diving into me in this new deepest position, I watched through half-eyes as sweat rallied down the arm that held him aloft. Mesmerized by his _in-out-in-out-in-out_ cadence and the glazed look that hooked my lips and then to my nipples that he ate with a voraciousness! I took the opportunity to suck Edward's peaked bicep, inner elbow, his forearm and then the blue-purple threads within his wrist.

Our teeth were bared. He battled in and out of me. Softness gave way to savagery! _How could he go on this long?_ Our mouths found each other again but kissing was impossible with the _Fuck, YES, mmmm, fuck fuck fuck, GOD FUCK!_ exhalations.

A suck-simper-lick was all we could muster.

With Edward faceting so deeply into me, and so quickly out of me, the end was near. My tummy racked up. His neck cracked back. My back sloughed out. His spine broke backwards! The nape of my neck broke in a howl! His cock was like an earthquake! My innards were a flash flood! And Edward's face was all yawning caverns and caved in, an open-mouthed moment of unthinking intensity! "Aaaaahhhh!" His hips jerked into me, hard. And I met each thrust as my own orgasm shuckled through me.

"_Aaaaaaah. God. fuck."_

Unwound.

Unbound.

Sleep full.

Edward stayed inside of me, as he often did, softening.

He strolled musical fingertips laxly up and down my spine…once up, once down.

I rolled over, awkwardly and with his help, until my momma-belly juggled against his baker's something-or-other pack of abs.

Edward smiled. Eyes shut. Hands dexterously stroking the small of my always aching back.

I bowed back just the littlest bit so that my newly buxom bosom and quarter-sized nipples met his perfectly chiseled chest. As my bits skirmed and teased against his, as my hips swayed and relaxed beneath his touch, as my baby-big stomach caressed his tum, Edward jammed one eye further closed, but squinted at me through the other. And his smile grew to that crooked half-smirk that was made for me alone.

Noses nuzzled.

I tasered him with sliver-lips slanted across his. And smiled on my own.

This was.

This _was_.

_Love._

This is.

This _is._

_Us._

And the future.

_**~Fin~**_

* * *

**A/N: I have to say, I had tears in my eyes while I was writing this last scene. This has been so bittersweet for me. And though I know most would not even read this because of the premise, the responses I have received have been staggering, and I am so grateful for those that bit the bullet and took the time. In fact, I bow down to you.**

**So if anything, any little word or scene or phrase called to you or pissed you off or made you, "Aaaah" or cry or want to throw your computer out the window only to come back and read more (eh, you know who I'm talkin' about), I beg you to review. **

**Switching gears, bigtime, **_**Alert alert alert (ME)**_**! I've got in my devious little verbose mind something new. I hope to kick it off in May, it is mostly planned out and much of it written. Here's a wee teaser: **

"_**The South has always been dirty but now it's gettin' ugly**_**.**_**"**_** This is the New South and the entire crew will be there! AU (can you say **_**mmmm**_** for vampy Rebelward? Y'all, who doesn't need a healthy dose of Southern drawlin' Edward?), canon pairings, following the major themes of the Twilight saga (I think) but with my own brand of irreverence, love, horror and **_**fuck yes you know it**_**, sweet-nasty sex…probably all ass-over-tea kettle as SM would never have imagined. A full tonnage of humor, angst, romance, and if you know anything about me by now, hot tasty sweet as key lime pie LEMONS!**

**See you all there, MWUH!  
**


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